I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different.
Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This starts with (nowadays) non-conformant shortcuts, includes window/buffer management (the terminology alone is archaic: panes are windows and windows are frames), and ends with elisp, which even Lisp programmers themselves rebuke.
But such a do-over is impossible in both LaTeX and emacs, since that would also mean throwing all the thousands (ten thousands?) packages--and lots of core functionality--away. Stuff that has accumulated for many decades and that is the reason why we're sticking with it: Everything else feels very limited in comparison.
And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things.
Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time.
> Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time.
Speaking from the experience of someone who has repeatedly bounced off Emacs for going on two decades now, you absolutely will. :)
> When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things.
This sort of "little thing" is, perhaps ironically, why I keep going back to BBEdit, at least for my technical writing work: it has a whole lot of these little "multipurpose tool" commands for text manipulation -- and, because they're in old-school Mac menus, they're discoverable. Thinking about it, that's one of the main reasons I bounce off both Emacs and Vim: it's not that I can't figure out the basics or even the, er, intermediates; it's that so much of the advanced stuff is relatively opaque. I am sure that there is probably a command in both Emacs and Vim that equates to, for instance, "find all lines matching this regex that occur more than once in this document, delete them, and copy them to a new document" (a task which sounds like I am making it up, but I swear I have had to do on multiple occasions in my current role). But I am also sure that it is not as easy as selecting "Text > Process Duplicate Lines..." and checking "Delete duplicate lines", "Leaving one" and "Match using pattern".
With modern autocomplete for commands, discovering commands in emacs has never been easier. "M-x sort" will show you all fuzzy completions of that commands basically instantly.
The flow you just mentioned I think looks nigh identical.