A common thread or line of argument that I find when reading about new editors is their out-of-the-box ease of use compared to Emacs and Vim. For example, a quote from the Atom blog:
>Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.
It doesn't seem like they (and many others) are denying that Emacs and Vim are excellent editors. Why is ease of use such an important issue for text editors? Emacs isn't terribly difficult to use, but if my livelihood and the majority of my time is tied to what tools I use, then it's worth the investment of time. I don't think I've met an Emacs user who has put in the effort of learning Elisp and customizing Emacs to their liking ever deny the benefits of learning it in the first place. Yes, it's a pain in the ass initially. I quit Emacs twice before I became determined to stop whining and spend quality time learning about tooling.
There is no doubt that Emacs has a steep learning curve and perhaps that's because its developers have a higher expectation of its users. I would argue that these expectations are easily matched by the capabilities of a competent programmer.
There is no reason why "editing plain text" should be anything other than immediately intuitive. Advanced, time-saving features, like multi-cursors or regexp-based find-and-replace, can and should be progressively revealed through normal use of the software.
This ludditic reverence for user-hostile text editors is one of the more perplexing and frustrating things about our industry.
> There is no reason why "editing plain text" should be anything other than immediately intuitive.
Are you suggesting that it isn't in Emacs?
Well, I remember using Emacs for the first time. It opened up and I started editing the opened file. I saved the file from the file menu (which also showed me the shortcut for saving the file the next time I have to save something). Done. Now, this is exactly what a novice would do with notepad.
I found that many people 'demonize' Emacs just because they found it unfamiliar. Sure it's unfamiliar. For about a day. Then, it's just as familiar as any other user interface. I now used Emacs for, well, the shell, the dired and wdired, multiple cursors, keyboard macros, project-wide grepping and everything in between. Getting familiar with the editor was a great thing to have done, however unfamiliar it was in the beginning.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can truly say that learning how to properly use a text editor, especially one so powerful as Emacs, is the one thing the any programmer absolutely must do. So, even if the editor isn't "anything other than immediately intuitive", it's still a good idea to wrap your head around the non-intuitive things.
Ah, but you forget to provide a reason to support your claim unlike me, who presented a basic use case which in fact refutes your claim (in the last comment).
> Emacs is obviously and inarguably not immediately intuitive.
"obviously" : I find it anything but obvious.
"inarguably": Really? So it can't even be argued? Well, I don't know what to say to that.
What is immediately intuitive about anything a programmer does on their machine? I assume you have used a Unix shell, right? Was there anything immediately intuitive about that? You've probably done some programming, so was there anything immediately intuitive about your programming language?
Editing plain text is in fact very easy. Structured text requires a little more logic, however. Ultimately, you could use emacs in the exact way one would use notepad++ and be none the wiser to the rich customizations under the hood. If thats your bag of tea, drink it.
>Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scripting languages.
It doesn't seem like they (and many others) are denying that Emacs and Vim are excellent editors. Why is ease of use such an important issue for text editors? Emacs isn't terribly difficult to use, but if my livelihood and the majority of my time is tied to what tools I use, then it's worth the investment of time. I don't think I've met an Emacs user who has put in the effort of learning Elisp and customizing Emacs to their liking ever deny the benefits of learning it in the first place. Yes, it's a pain in the ass initially. I quit Emacs twice before I became determined to stop whining and spend quality time learning about tooling.
There is no doubt that Emacs has a steep learning curve and perhaps that's because its developers have a higher expectation of its users. I would argue that these expectations are easily matched by the capabilities of a competent programmer.