[current_call]

But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it.

I don't believe that. The people who snub Vim and Emacs, but are willing to sink time into learning new editors, new languages, and new frameworks have no excuse. If they were less susceptible to marketing, then they'd be able to learn something old every once in a while.

I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.

People have been attempting this for years with little success. The only projects I know of that have traction are Spacemacs and Neovim. The former is just an Emacs distribution and the latter is backwards compatible with Vim.

[TylerE]

It is in fact possible to learn and KNOW Emacs and Vim and still prefer alternatives to either of them.

[dsego]

kakoune?

[fra]

Kakoune doesn't run on Windows, so not cross-platform.