My experience with Emacs has been a steady upward trajectory, gaining understanding and access to functionality. I now use CIDER and TRAMP every working day, and no true equivalent exists for any other editor (though many are catching up to CIDER, due to Clojure being the better lisp!).
The biggest problems with Emacs, to me, are the rendering performance, the lack of sufficient threading, the default keyboard-accessible windowing commands, and Elisp being unergonomic and sad.
The course I'd chart for an ideal Emacs would be rendering with something like Alacritty†, some default windowing commands similar to tmux, and phasing out Elisp in favour of a Clojure dialect; the last bit would help a lot with introducing some basic sources of concurrency.
† Plus smooth scrolling surfaces, since a text editor generally does not have enough surfaces that the memory overhead of tiled surfaces is a serious issue like it is for general-purpose renderers like web browsers.
The biggest problems with Emacs, to me, are the rendering performance, the lack of sufficient threading, the default keyboard-accessible windowing commands, and Elisp being unergonomic and sad.
The course I'd chart for an ideal Emacs would be rendering with something like Alacritty†, some default windowing commands similar to tmux, and phasing out Elisp in favour of a Clojure dialect; the last bit would help a lot with introducing some basic sources of concurrency.
† Plus smooth scrolling surfaces, since a text editor generally does not have enough surfaces that the memory overhead of tiled surfaces is a serious issue like it is for general-purpose renderers like web browsers.