[lloeki]

We're talking terminal (not GUI) editors here. If I fire emacs on macOS there's no menu displayed by default. If I connect remotely on a Debian machine, the menu is there but mouse reporting is not working. The help, if started by itself, vanishes at the first keypress (on macOS), which makes it really easy to skip the C-x C-c part, and uses the emacs-only convention of C- instead of the well known ^ for control (although it's explained right there), thus doubly easy to miss. I can see how newcomers would be turned away from it.

[AsyncAwait]

vi(m) is usually included by default and is no easier to use for a beginner, so why not emacs?

[lloeki]

`apt-get install emacs-nox` pulls in 83MB on jessie. The installed-by-default one is vim-tiny (clocking in at 27MB), not vim-nox (which pulls in an additional 21MB), for which there is no similar emacs package. Turns out nano is ~370kB, that makes for a small non-modal beginner editor, the modal one being covered by vim-tiny.

[AsyncAwait]

Fair, but I don't think 20MB vs 80MB should be a problem in 2017, people are downloading ~60GB games off Steam, downloading a ~5GB ISO every 6-24 months is not that much in comparison.

[type0]

For some people on the move data transfers are expensive, even if 80MB isn't much that adds up very fast.

[cryptonector]

Because modal editing is where it's at!