The number of devs who can competently use Vim or Emacs is already on the low side. The number of non-devs that can do it is far lower. The file needs to be editable by _any_ user with a text editor, not just a developer versed in Vim/Emacs.
I know the response will be "they'll just open it in Excel anyway" which is true in most cases, but I frequently have clients that want to download an export, modify it real quick with a text editor (many use Notepad++ for this), and then reupload it. They're usually doing massive find/replaces on the data and then reuploading into the system and a simple text editor is a lot better for this than Excel.
> The number of devs who can competently use Vim or Emacs is already on the low side. The number of non-devs that can do it is far lower. The file needs to be editable by _any_ user with a text editor, not just a developer versed in Vim/Emacs.
Emacs defaults to a menu + toolbar and the arrow/pageup/pagedown/home/end keys are functional. There are buttons with icons and labels for new document, open document, find in document, and copy/cut/paste. It's friendlier to use than something like Notepad++, gedit, or kate out of the box for simple editing. For more complicated stuff, there are menus and extensive documentation. The narrative that emacs is impossible to use for any but the programming elite doesn't fit the default experience.
If you define competently use as can extensively configure beyond the default state, then I'd argue that very few recent developers outside of those who use vim/emacs users have ever done so. How many people have you met who have written C# to extend Visual Studio or some Java to extend Eclipse/IntelliJ. Even with things like Atom, how many of those Atom users are writing Javascript packages versus using the packages someone else wrote?
If you define competently use as "be able to edit and debug in $x language", I'd argue the menu-driven approach in emacs is just as valid as the menu-driven in approach in any other random gui editor. The difference is that emacs can be customized and has decades of documentation and examples to pull from for any conceivable scenario. Want to interact with your editing environment with foot pedals, talk on that fancy new chat interface, interface with a serial port to pull sensor data or control a personal massager? You can find someone who has done it and documented it on emacs.
CS PhD and professional software engineer here. I can edit files very slowly and inefficiently in both vim and emacs but it would be a mess to use them for real work.
Some people never learned either of the editors. So what? The physical act of writing text was never the hard part of software engineering.
I know the response will be "they'll just open it in Excel anyway" which is true in most cases, but I frequently have clients that want to download an export, modify it real quick with a text editor (many use Notepad++ for this), and then reupload it. They're usually doing massive find/replaces on the data and then reuploading into the system and a simple text editor is a lot better for this than Excel.