[chr1]

To understand what's wrong with emacs pretend that you are a new user that doesn't know emacs, but is familiar with editors in browsers, and other places ordinary people use.

When you start to use emacs everything will be wrong, the few shortcuts you know such as ctrl-c/v/x/z/f will do strange things, scrolling won't move text smoothly like other programs but will jump several lines always keeping first line exactly aligned, so you feel lost all the time. When you select something and scroll emacs will destroy the selection and keep cursor in viewport (i am still not sure if this is a feature, or just a glaring bug that no one cares to fix).

Now you try sublime and it is beautiful! It comes with beautiful theme, beautiful chrome-like tabs (they even scroll!), fantastic smooth scrolling, pretty minimap that helps you see whole document at once, built in fuzzy search, and easily configurable plugins.

Why would you even try learning emacs where you constantly feel lost, instead of sublime which makes you feel powerful?

> I don't see anything this editor does that emacs can't do.

in short it's not only important to do something, but do it with style;)

[steveeq1]

Ok, as I am an emacs user, I somewhat see your point. But the counterpoint is that most hackers spend a good part of their day on text editors and ide's, so it's not unreasonable to spend some time learning it for greater productivity gains later. Yes, there is a greater learning curve with emacs, but it seems to be more extensible than any other editors out there. The ctrl-c/v/x/z/f shortcuts can easily be remapped, the minimap module is available, as well as multiple cursors. That's the great thign about emacs, it can be extended to do just about anything.

It reminds me of a quote from the great Marvin Minsky: “A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.”

[chr1]

I agree that extensibility is a great thing, that's why i spent some time learning emacs. But unfortunately no amount of elisp could fix the bugs in core: jumpy scrolling, and keeping cursor always on screen. And more importantly after some time it turned out that i used all that extensibility mostly to get on par with other editors, so to me emacs felt more like a construction kit for a violin rather than an actual violin.

Hopefully new generation of browser based editors like cloud9 or atom will provide extenibility similar to emacs, but will start from more sensible place.