"The fact that Emacs and Vim lack features attractive to newcomers tells nothing about their value. Musicians and Craftsmen invest years in learning their tools

"The fact that Emacs and Vim lack features attractive to newcomers tells nothing about their value. Musicians and Craftsmen invest years in learning their tools or instruments." Those editors have value to folks that have invested time in learning them but they are not intuitive. Using an editor, or any tool actually, should not require memorization. Functionality should be discoverable. I can't speak for you or your usage pattern, but I don't have the time, nor the capacity, to memorize commands for every program I use. This would include shortcuts for GUI apps. I use a lot of apps and code in a few languages and use more APIs than I care to. I'm spread thin. I'm not a sysadmin type spending all day in vi, or emacs. For the languages I code in, I don't know all the features in and out. Ditto for the frameworks/APIs I use. Hell, I don't even know all the features of my IDE. There's too much to know/deal with. For me, personally, I don't want a text editor to be "something that requires knowledge to use". I just need to use it occasionally, and I just need to make a few edits. Editing a simple text file in vi/vim is excrutiating. Some people code in that thing. lol. Perhaps a hex editor wasn't readily available.