IMHO out of the box experience does not matter that much from a point-on, because configuring emacs with an existing configuration is very easy. You just need t

IMHO out of the box experience does not matter that much from a point-on, because configuring emacs with an existing configuration is very easy. You just need to save your .emacs.d folder and every config you've accumulated over years is there. The nice thing about emacs is the extensibility, you can very easily write your own modules load it etc. I understand the same argument could be made for VS Code, but I think emacs is here to stay, because Electron can never be as responsive as a native application. On the other hand it's true that installing emacs packages and getting them working is cumbersome. Maybe, as a community, we need to prepare modular dot files. For example, are you a Go developer, go install Go Emacs. Or are you a web developer Go install Web Emacs etc. Having a set of prewritten configs would benefit Emacs's popularity. For example my init.el in .emacs.d consists of a couple of lines loading my modules: (package-initialize) (load-file "~/.emacs.d/melpa.el") (load-file "~/.emacs.d/golang.el") (load-file "~/.emacs.d/readability.el") (I see now that there are some prepared configs such as https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d)