A common thread or line of argument that I find when reading about new editors is their out-of-the-box ease of use compared to Emacs and Vim. For example, a quote from the Atom blog: >Sublime and TextMate offer convenience but only limited extensibility. On the other end of the spectrum, Emacs and Vim offer extreme flexibility, but they aren't very approachable and can only be customized with special-purpose scriptin…
There is no reason why "editing plain text" should be anything other than immediately intuitive. Advanced, time-saving features, like multi-cursors or regexp-based find-and-replace, can and should be progressively revealed through normal use of the software. This ludditic reverence for user-hostile text editors is one of the more perplexing and frustrating things about our industry.
Are you suggesting that it isn't in Emacs?
Well, I remember using Emacs for the first time. It opened up and I started editing the opened file. I saved the file from the file menu (which also showed me the shortcut for saving the file the next time I have to save something). Done. Now, this is exactly what a novice would do with notepad.
I found that many people 'demonize' Emacs just because they found it unfamiliar. Sure it's unfamiliar. For about a day. Then, it's just as familiar as any other user interface. I now used Emacs for, well, the shell, the dired and wdired, multiple cursors, keyboard macros, project-wide grepping and everything in between. Getting familiar with the editor was a great thing to have done, however unfamiliar it was in the beginning.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can truly say that learning how to properly use a text editor, especially one so powerful as Emacs, is the one thing the any programmer absolutely must do. So, even if the editor isn't "anything other than immediately intuitive", it's still a good idea to wrap your head around the non-intuitive things.