alt Hacker NewsIt was always like that before about 10 years ago. You're getting your feet wet in programming, learning about free alternatives, and you learn that all the world's legendary hackers become proficient in one of either vi (vim) or Emacs. So you dig in and you find that, as your awareness of programming languages grows, Emacs is a "good-enough" solution for working in nearly all of them. (Vim is too, but maybe a bit less so in 1995 when I was starting out.) And if you want to program effectively cross-language, there's nothing you can do but lock the fuck in and learn your editor's idiosyncrasies, shortcuts, and programming/customization features.
These days we're all spoiled by Visual Studio Code, Zed, even things like Geany and Notepad++. So it makes less sense for neophytes to start with something as ancient and idiosyncratic as Emacs, and Emacs does not enjoy nearly the prominence or mindshare it had decades ago. (Though I understand its absolute user base has grown.)
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For me what I found was that on early 90s telnet-accessible Unix systems the only pre-installed or easily installed editor that actually let me use... luxuries... like arrow keys and backspace was emacs. Vi was always there but modal editing repulses me and it also didn't work with arrow keys and the like. (I've never understood the fixation with avoiding them in favour of repurposing letter keys, something that is just a holdover from the very anemic terminal keyboard that vi was first developed on.)
Emacs was literally the sanest option unless you could bribe the sysadmin into installing "joe" or similar. ("pico" and "nano" came later).
The other thing is back in the day emacs was often a good option for running clients to connect to things like IRC or MUDs or MOOs, and even Gopher and the early web. It was also an excellent news and mail reader!
And so I used emacs as a general text editor and MOO and IRC client long before I ever used it for writing source code really (for which it was also obviously very good).
I used vim for about 15 years and emacs for the last 6 or 7 and never has it been easier to emacs. For years it was searching Google, blog posts and manuals for "how do I do X in emacs?" and now it's trivial to ask AI. I always have a Copilot session open in my emacs config so it can tell me how my emacs does something and can update my config for me.