I guess I could give emacs a shot, just whenever I've seen people use it it looks like they're pressing a shitload of keys to do the most basic of stuff, despite having amazing macros to do rather complex stuff.
But aside from that, this looks fantastic, it'd be interesting to see if more text editors could be ported to it (e.g. Sublime Text 2)
In emacs, there is often stuff going on in the background that you may not notice by just watching somebody use it. For example, I could be setting the region, copying it and saving it to a register, when it looks like I'm just moving the cursor around a bit. This is true for quite a bit of the commands I use often. I also don't like having too much visual feedback, so it's even harder for others to follow what I'm doing.
Also, one you get used to the commands, it's often easier to use too many without thinking rather than planning out an efficient way to do something.
There’s a tradeoff involved. Sometimes the effort of planning is greater than that of doing it by hand. Usually I start a repetitive task, notice the repetition, then finish it off in a better way only if it’s less work than going on manually. There’s perhaps more value in noticing longer trends; for example, making a keybinding to duplicate the current line when you find yourself saying C-{a k k y y} more than is healthy.
It has been said that you can always spot an inexperienced emacs user because they haven't rebound the default key bindings yet. Not sure I agree with that personally, but it's certainly possible to come up with less keyboard intensive mappings if you want to.
I tried using viper and vimpulse modes in emacs to get vim-style keybindings. The problem was that SLIME docs and most emacs tutorials assumed standard emacs keybindings.
In principle, you could convert all those docs and tutorials to use more vim-like keybindings, but that would be a lot of effort, and you'd have to learn emacs/SLIME with standard keybindings first.
Furthermore, if you rely on non-standard keybindings, you'd be completely lost when reading a conversation between typical emacs users, when they say stuff like "oh, just use C-X-a-b C-Y-c-d" or whatever (as they do in another post in this very thread).
For better or for worse, it seems the default keybindings in emacs are pretty tightly bound to its culture and ecosystem.
Whilst you do need to learn the basic editing keys to get anything done in emacs, a lot of the time you just use M-x which opens an auto-completing input for you to type a command. Also the built in help features such as apropos make things easier.
But aside from that, this looks fantastic, it'd be interesting to see if more text editors could be ported to it (e.g. Sublime Text 2)