[wwarner]

As a longtime emacs user, this perfectly summarizes what is most awful about it! It makes me cringe when people wag their fingers to correct the "misperception" that emacs is merely a great text editor and IDE, but rather a programmable elisp application platform. In reality, vanilla emacs with only a little bit of configuration (and as with any other editor, substantially more tinkering with installation and configuration of supporting binaries), provides a really great programming environment for almost any type of application.

[spauldo]

There's a lot of good text editors out there, though. Vanilla Emacs with some tweaks is decent, sure, but if all you do is use the basic editing commands then you'll probably feel more at home with a different editor.

Look at the tutorial - it does everything it can to encourage you not to use the arrow keys or PGUP/PGDN. No, you're supposed to learn all kinds of whacky key combinations instead. That's all for a good reason but it's hardly encouraging for new users faced with the choice of doing things the "proper" way and building new muscle memory vs. using the keys they already know.

If all you want is a decent editor to get some work done without having to spend a fair amount of time learning the editor itself, Emacs probably isn't the best choice.

(To others reading this comment: Emacs editing commands have a hierarchy of sorts. It's powerful, and context-aware. But it requires you to internalize things like CTRL-f to move the cursor to the right. Unless you make the effort to learn them - or use evil-mode - you miss out on a good chunk of what makes Emacs so great for editing.)

[kreyenborgi]

It reminds me of the "actually a monad is" explanations. Yes monads are wonderful mathemagical infinityburritos that you can spend phds studying, but they also just happen to be very practical and useful even when you don't know you're using them and even if you have no emotional reaction to the name Simon.

[skydhash]

It's also a great file manager, a good shell environment, a document viewer, a mail viewer and composer, a process manager, a music player, and you can play games in it. All powered by elisp.