I'm a die-hard Emacs fan, but it's a tool. It works well -- really well for a lot of us. For the rest, honestly, I don't care very much about evangelizing Emacs because I have a lot left to explore about using it first. There is 20- and 30- year old elisp out there that still runs perfectly well on a modern Emacs and probably solves some of your problems. Rendering a crop of the latest fly-by-night emoji is honestly the least of my concerns (with reference to the MacOS thing), although I personally disagree strongly with Stallman's stance in that matter.

I agree about the docs being dense and somewhat unapproachable, a lot could be done towards making elisp easier to approach. I think a big problem here is the unapproachability of any Lisp (not just Emacs Lisp) as a scripting and configuration language. In fact, I wonder if (Clojure being the first), elisp is the second most popular scripted Lisp in existence.

Of course you do. This policy doesn't benefit you in the slightest, and since you are a macOS user already, all of your experience is telling you that this policy doesn't work.

But this particular policy is logical, and it doesn't really hurt Emacs. And, who knows, perhaps one day some talented/bored macOS developer will become so unhappy with Emacs not showing the latest fashion of emojis, they will go on and implement that support in Free libraries that are used for text rendering on GNU/Linux, and contribute it upstream.

Emacs does have sane defaults. Did you mean instead you want defaults that remind you of the defaults in other (younger) programs that people might be more familiar with? That can be useful to gain more users. But it doesn't require an Emacs "clone", just an Emacs package with the settings you want. This approach is actually pretty popular: many people use CUA mode, Evil or even a distribution like Doom or Spacemacs. There's no need to change Emacs just to change a few defaults.

There are also package that address the "modern UI conventions" part of your complaint too to some extent, and again, distributions like Doom and Spacemacs include some of these packages. (Personally I only care if UI is practical and efficient, not if it is modern, but I do understand that some people like modern UIs for their own sake.)

Worthy of mention, of course, is Spacemacs[1], which made Emacs approachable to me, someone who hadn't used much beyond Notepad++ and Eclipse before then.

[1]: https://www.spacemacs.org/

Yes it does, for me anyways, for the most part. While I definitely plan to dive deeper, I'm using plenty of Emacs stuff via Spacemacs, and I've customized plenty of stuff by copy/pasting incomprehensible elisp snippets.

Of course as a Lisp weenie I do intend to dive into Emacs and honestly part of the reason I don't is that I'm afraid I'll end up spending way too much time diving and tinkering.

Linux and Kubernetes are structured the same way- nobody is using that out of box on it's own

Emacs kind of gives me that same vibe. I used it for many years to organize my research but still have a hard time remembering key strokes and such .. though i dont have a similar issue with vim whose modal interface I find rather pleasantly compositional. So I get both the sense of power and flexibility, and the chaos of it.

I'm somewhat curious what choices of Stallman's you think are holding it back. Feels more alive to me than it has ever felt. And that branch that is using gcc to compile elisp is a delight.

I concede I expect there are choices made that could be bad; but I suspect most of the choices people think matter, don't. Which is why i highlight the compiling elisp branch. A complete rewrite would not have had as much of an impact. And, frankly, I feel elisp is easily as good of a language as any proposed choice. Better than most.

Emacs is absolutely a household name, at least in the world of text editors…

I’ve never had a conversation with a software developer where they didn’t know what vim or emacs are.

Ok.

But of those people who stick with vi for more than 6 months, how many of them have yet to hear of emacs at that point? Maybe 5%?

1) Emacs? What is that? Looks like it came out before I was born. No thank you, I need something modern.

2) Emacs? That's still around?! I remember that from my Vax days...

Either way, few of them would countenance the idea of using Emacs to do professional software development in 2020. The vast, vast majority of developers out there use either a large feature-rich IDE like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or Eclipse... or they use Visual Studio Code.

4.5%. So not many but it's certainly "among."

My teachers in highschool knew what Office was and how to use it. I doubt most teachers now have heard the name VS code and don't know why they'd want it.

1) Who cares about being a household name. Vain goals serve no one 2) You didn't specify one actionable change.

Please quote where I asked anyone to do anything. I merely explained why emacs is not popular and why in my opinion it will never be.

This is sad to me because I quite like emacs, and if I had the capacity to fork it I would.