Kinda strange.

Emacs is so inherently keyboard-focused that I fail to see the point of this... nor the need for it?!

Emacs has thousands of shortcuts for every conceivable piece of functionality. Personally, I will remember shortcuts for commonly used things - and all the other functionality may as well not exist if it is not easily discoverable.

A gui is a nice way to make a lot of functionality discoverable.

> may as well not exist if it is not easily discoverable.

But it is easily discoverable ?

I literally just do M-x and can I get a buffer open with _all_ emacs commands and their explanation, and can do a fuzzy search on that, e.g., so if I type "M-x align re" I get only one command highlighted that can just execute "align-regexp".

That's the main thing I like about emacs. I don't have to remember a million shortcuts, just what things are possible, and then I just type a description of what I want to do and hit enter and that's it.

A GUI / having to use the mouse would push me completely out of "the zone".

That's cool if you can remember roughly what the command is called. For example, I wanted to format some XMl in a buffer. In a GUI, I'm fairly sure I could find this easily, in emacs it is "go to google" and find out that you want sgml-petty-print or whatever. So a bunch of M-x searching for "format" is hopeless.

Emacs tends to have its own names for many concepts, making things even more obtuse.

But yes, to be frank, my productivity in Emacs really took off once I started memorizing things with flashcards. I currently have 603 cards for Emacs (including elisp).

(And telling a newbie that would cause a lot of despair!)[2]

The other thing that really helped is I started using/making hydras.[1] So now when I encounter a new, interesting mode, instead of memorizing lots of command names or keybindings, I just build my own custom menus.

[1] https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

[2] But it really shouldn't. Emacs, with all its packages, and modes, is like a language with all its libraries, and not just the standard ones. Remembering all the commands/keybindings is akin to expecting someone to know all the APIs in all the libraries. It's OK if you don't. Most people don't.