[tikhonj]

Emacs doesn't have to be ugly: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/img/prettyEmacs.png

The reason Emacs users come out is simple: there is an absurd amount of anti-Emacs FUD spread by non-Emacs users which can scare reasonable people away from using it. If nobody disagreed with it, it would seem true. More perniciously, people would start assuming that it was the case without questioning that assumption.

[kamaal]

I will agree with you on that, provided vanilla emacs ships with such a pretty GUI like sublime text 2 or like the image you posted.

I have enough work to do already. Customizing the editor to look like that has got to be somebody else's job.

[_pius]

I like Emacs, but "pretty" is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when I see that screenshot.