[JoelMcCracken]

To navigate emacs, you really only need to know ctrl, alt, and the basic norms of keyboard usage (return for newline/accept, shift for capitals)

Really, compared to what I see here, the chief difficulty with emacs is the sheer volume of possible commands, and the heterogeneity of their names and patterns, which I believe is all a result of its development history. But the basics are just as you describe.

[layer8]

It’s a good question to what complexity (volume) the approach scales, but dialog boxes can get you quite far, and menus are fundamentally “just” a tree like keyboard shortcuts are.

Emacs has Elisp commands first, then keyboard shortcuts for them, then maybe (not as a rule) menu items, and rarely dialog boxes. The Turbo Vision approach, from its design philosophy, has menus and dialogs first, then keyboard shortcuts for them.

One approach isn’t strictly better than the other, nor are they mutually exclusive. Ideally you’d always have both. My disagreement is with the “I think Emacs still does all of this” above. Emacs is substantially different in its emphasis, presentation, and its use of dialogs.

[JoelMcCracken]

Yeah that’s fair. In many ways the spacemacs/doom model is more akin to what you describe, with a lot of caveats; it’s not a total rework of all key bindings. In emacs novice affordances are usually an afterthought, not part of the core design and community norms.

Of course, I must say there is a trade off here: you can design for novices or for advanced users, but very often not both.