[dmitriid]

> And Emacs Lisp doesn't feel super accessible to most software developers under 40.

Or over 40 (I'm 42) :)

> Almost all its conventions come from a small little island, it's like marsupials in Australia, their own little parallel evolution.

This is a great analogy. And people forget that to program any system effeciently you need to know that system. Not necessarily inside-out, but good enough. A brief look at any emacs config will show you just how many weird and inconsistent things you have to contend with: major modes, minor modes, hooks, global variables, global functions, mode-specific global functions, special lists, non-special lists, and a myriad API calls and functions in between.

Wikipedia says that emacs has 10 000 (ten thousand) built-in commands [1] That's probably on par with JVM :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

[oblio]

The worst part for me is that I wanted a few "simple" UI tweaks with Emacs. I really wanted to use it.

But I wanted it to have a native tab bar and I wanted to move the command bar at the top, with dropdowns instead of "expand-ups" (turns out, I read right-to-left, top-down, not right-to-left, bottom-up. You can't have either of those, in the world's most extensible editor :-(

[tmtvl]

Emacs has had tab-bar-mode since 27.1 and tab-line-mode since 27.2. As for the drop-down minibuffer (I suspect that's what you mean by "command bar"), you can use something like vertico-posframe* and put it at the top like so:

  (setq vertico-posframe-poshandler #'posframe-poshandler-frame-top-center)

* https://github.com/tumashu/vertico-posframe