> I don't think one can compare the difficulty of learning IntelliJ IDEA with the difficulty of learning Emacs. Of course you can. Granted, I don't use Intelli

> I don't think one can compare the difficulty of learning IntelliJ IDEA with the difficulty of learning Emacs. Of course you can. Granted, I don't use IntelliJ, but I used PyCharm, Komodo and Visual Studio, among others. Emacs is easier to learn: despite decades of cruft it's more consistent and follows the rule of least astonishment closer than PyCharm. The problem is that PyCharm and other IDEs build on conventions already familiar to most users (locking themselves to these conventions, which limits their usability for powerusers, but that's another matter), while Emacs doesn't. That's because Emacs predates these conventions. Still, there are many efforts which make Emacs much more familiar to "normal people". As LightTable failed (and I'm not sure what's happening with Atom) Emacs is once again the most modern text and code editor. > When starting out with Emacs, you even need to learn how to quit it. I think you're thinking about VIM, and even there (with gVIM) it's not true. Do you seriously believe what you wrote or is it just flamebait?