what makes Emacs fundamentally powerful: it's an emulated Lisp machine. There's a big difference between fundamental power and actual usefulness. A volcano is

what makes Emacs fundamentally powerful: it's an emulated Lisp machine. There's a big difference between fundamental power and actual usefulness. A volcano is fundamentally powerful, but good luck trying to convince it to build your house for you. In practice, a useful fundamental power will sooner-or-later manifest itself as a big, complex, occasionally sloppy ecosystem of useful tools. We don't interact directly with geothermal energy. Instead, some people build generators that turn it into electricity, and then other people build factories to build fans that run on the electricity, and then shopkeepers build stores that can sell the fans. So, when I need to be cool, all I need to do is buy a fan, plug it in and turn it on. I don't need to start from scratch and build it all for myself. What am I saying? I'm saying that you're welcome to start over with an emulated Lisp machine and a set of minimalist editing commands. And then you're welcome to build useful things like (e.g.) js2-mode on top of that minimalist editor. But then you will slap yourself on the head because you will discover that you've gone to all this trouble, but all you've done is rewritten emacs! Meanwhile, if I want to edit Javascript, all I do is download Yegge's js2-mode and turn it on. But would rebuilding emacs in an innovative way be a good thing? Yes. It's not a bad idea at all. But it's hard to make it pay off. TextMate has made a very solid attempt, but I'm suspicious of the long-term merits of the closed-source, one-platform model, and an editor has to be built to last. (I note that the new fashion seems to be for TextMate users to try emacs!) And who is going to pay you to write another open-source editor? It is not a small project.