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.
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.
Someone who cannot competently use either vim or emacs is not a developer.
> The number of non-devs that can do it is far lower.
The emacs paper talked about departmental secretaries using — and extending — emacs. Human beings are far cleverer than we like to think.
Some people never learned either of the editors. So what? The physical act of writing text was never the hard part of software engineering.
Accordingly, the reference to "54 year old" appears to be to the first standard as well as first commercial use of ASCII, in 1963.
That first ASCII standard from 1963 specified eight "separators" simply named S0 through S7 at codes 0x18--0x1F. The 1965 update reused the first four for other purposes (eg cancel and escape) and labeled 0x1C--0x1F with the more descriptive names we now know.
