From the Paleozoic era

These longtime Unix apps still have devotees (mostly from the days when not much else was available). I'm not among them.

Emacs

Emacs' tag line calls it "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor." Note there's nothing in there that touts "easy to use" or "intuitive" -- and with good reason. This is not an editor for those who like WYSIWYG software; nor is it one for someone who wants writing tools such as spell check.

Emacs has been around on Unix for decades, and it still has devotees who like it for programming. I can see why, based on its listing of features: "controlling subprocesses; automatic indentation of programs; viewing two or more files at once; editing formatted text; and dealing in terms of characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs and pages, as well as expressions and comments in several different programming languages."

However, I'd characterize the UI as actively hostile.

What if, say, I want to create a new file in Emacs? Should I really need to check a manual? There's no "new file" option under the file menu, and a stab at control-N got me the admonition:

This buffer is for notes you don't want to save and for Lisp evaluation. If you want to create a file, visit that file with C-x C-f, then enter the text in that file's own buffer.

OK, except from where I'd ended up, Ctrl-X Ctrl-F just got me a lot of angry beeps. Not an auspicious start.