> and modal editing saved my career from an early death by wrist injury
The fun thing is I stopped experiencing wrist pain after I switched from Vim to Emacs (with ±native bindings), partly because I moved Ctrl to Caps almost instantly, partly because I stopped using a lot 3rd party apps (e.g. XMPP/IRC clients) which required mouse.
But you to have to know where to click. And that's the biggest problem with so-called "modern" UIs - it lacks discoverability. Either you memorize all menus and dialogs, or you have to seek out the functionality you need each time you can't remember anything. And sometimes these dialogs change, so you have to rediscover everything once again.
In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys.
> You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect.
One of the main reasons I moved to Emacs (11 years ago) was Common Lisp and SLIME.
> If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp.
> but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim.
In Emacs - you don't have, there are a lot of packages which make the discoverability a breeze - counsel-M-x, helm-M-x for exploring all commands with corresponding shortcuts and also which-key, which allows you to automatically pop up the "next steps" in your current state.
How about having a mental capacity to remember all menus/dialog boxes in your IDE?
You don't, there's an MTA for that, but for composing mail, filtering mailbox, searching and other text-related tasks Emacs has much superior interface.
> be an IRC client
Messaging consists mostly of text editing, especially in IRC, which doesn't have fancy stuff like stickers, GIFs, videos.
> What difference does it make what programs do those things, as long as they work well and I can extend the functionality as needed?
A consistent, self-documenting, extendable interface.
> Emacs was invented for a world where Text was everything.
Text is still a large part of computing.
> These days programming languages are designed around tooling.
Every time I see a language which requires a lot of tooling to use it comfortably, usually it's bad designed one
> The whole idea of one having to press less buttons to move text around is really a solution for a problem that doesn't exist in the modern world.
I think the idea is not about having to press fewer buttons, but to bother your brain with unnecessary things as little as possible. With Emacs, you don't have to remember "where the hell is this command and what is the shortcut for it?", you type M-x (especially if you use plugins like counsel or helm) type some related words and that's it. You don't have to know how every function works - M-x decribe-function at your service! Not enough? You can always jump to definition and take a look at it.
> The thing is that kind of text manipulation work isn't common anymore.
You still write programs in text, the commands you give to computer ARE text too, even "modern" menus are nothing but text.
> The thing is that kind of text manipulation work isn't common anymore.
Emacs has LSP plugins, if that's what you are talking about
> Or in general some emacs features ported to vscode would be really neat.