I don't love Emacs' UI either, but imposing a new UI on it won't work, unless you rethink its entire model, in which case you'll no longer have Emacs. A better

I don't love Emacs' UI either, but imposing a new UI on it won't work, unless you rethink its entire model, in which case you'll no longer have Emacs. A better way to help new users with Emacs' daunting learning curve might be to make a game. A fun game would get that stuff into muscle-memory pretty quickly.