Emacs was a godsend for my 16 year old self. It's an immensely self-documenting and self-explanatory system, and vastly different in that regard than anything

Emacs was a godsend for my 16 year old self. It's an immensely self-documenting and self-explanatory system, and vastly different in that regard than anything else. (Though once you go down the rabbit hole you eventually start to realize that elisp is a crappy way to program and the whole thing has a big-ball-of-mud architecture... Oh well.) Point is, your preconceptions, from the heights of your experience, of what "newbies" find intuitive are likely very wrong.