Preface: I have been using Emacs as my only editor for over ten years.
This article is at once extremely funny to me and extremely frustrating.
Funny, in that it reads like a tabloid magazine article from an alternate reality where the goings-on of our savior RMS is the hottest gossip available, and Emacs is the topic du jour.
Frustrating, from what I perceive to be an impenetrable thickness from RMS and RMS-adjacent Linux contributors/Emacs users. People who use text editors just don't care. (not to imply that they ought to care.) It's not just that Emacs, as it tends to ship, is extraordinarily ugly. It's not just that Emacs is difficult to master, or that it requires knowledge of Lisp to be meaningfully configurable, or that it isn't friendly to new users. It's all of this and many more.
People use VS Code and Sublime Text and Atom and $EDITOR because they're simple on the surface, they're easy to install (you just download it and go), don't need heaps of customization to become useful, don't force the user into learning a completely new set of metaphors, etc. etc. The average developer just wants to write some code.
This quote got it the most right:
> [...] no Microsoft word user has ever considered themselves to have opened a "buffer". They open "files". They move "windows" around, not "frames." They cut and paste not kill and yank, etc.
As long as core usage of the basic functionality of the software demands users learn a totally new set of concepts, develop new mental models, and develop intuition for new design metaphors, Emacs isn't going to win over (m)any new users. It doesn't matter how much Emacs users try to evangelize (what ends up amounting to,) their system of beliefs, or attempt to proselytize their design as "best", or most well-reasoned. Unless Emacs ditches its fundamental philosophy that it ought not to "baby" the user by natively offering familiar and welcoming design patterns and a de-facto feature set that people living in this century expect by default, I don't see Emacs gaining meaningful share.
People use the alternatives because they simply don't care about the things that Emacs contributors care about. If, down the road, they end up caring, those alternatives do indeed offer plenty of reward for those who take the time to learn; it's just that with the alternatives, the ceiling is presumably much lower than for Emacs. On the other hand, the floor is much higher. With Emacs, the floor is somewhere around the molten core of the Earth.
Meanwhile, you have Emacs core contributors quibbling about rounding edges and custom icons; unable to come to a consensus about all manner of trivialities, when what they really need is a seismic shift in core philosophy. It reeks of impending irrelevancy and a gives profound sense that Emacs is deeply out of touch with what the average person wants, as far as their mission of actually getting people to use the product goes.