As a long-time Emacs user who also occasionally uses Vi and very rarely Vim... but also knows a bunch of people who are in the later camp: nobody in that camp b

As a long-time Emacs user who also occasionally uses Vi and very rarely Vim... but also knows a bunch of people who are in the later camp: nobody in that camp buys / uses "non-US" keyboards. Even on "US" keyboards, the amount of remapping a typical user does to their keys is significant. In other words: you are complaining about a problem that doesn't exist. Users who want Vim / Emacs experience don't want keyboards that don't work well with their editor of choice. They will not be in a situation where they have to adjust their editor to the keyboard layout. If there's a mismatch, then the keyboard will be adjusted, not the editor. Now, I'm not sure how Vi(m) users handle other written languages, but since I every now and then have to write in two non-Latin languages, in Emacs, I keep buffers for those languages with input method set accordingly. However, say, I need to write in Cyrillic, I still use the en_US modified QUERTY layout that I use for everything else + phonetic transliteration into Cyrillic. This is both easier for touch-typing, as I don't have to memorize several different layouts, and this method makes more letters easily available than there would've been on a physical keyboard. So... no. don't stop incorporating Emacs / Vi key usage into new products. It works great. Also: > ignores the past few decades of UX research Except there was none. Unless you mean it in the same way how for some reason people who make HTML pages call themselves "UX developers". What happened is that big companies wanted to sell products that looked "impressive", but offered worse user experience overall. This is how MSVS, Eclipse, and similar happened. There's literally no UX research on how people deal with typing text into computers. Whereas in practice, what I see is that people who use "visual" tools just suck at writing text. And, myself, having worked with both "visual" editors and Emacs / Vi, I would literally refuse a job position if I had to work with VSCode / IntelliJ products.