Yes, pre-cooked packages of defaults make things a lot easier for new users, but not quite equivalent to GUI text editors. I don’t get the impression that most people being introduced to Emacs are told to use a package of defaults. I think a lot of users will want to try out Emacs, so they download Emacs, then try to configure some things they don’t like by Googling the specific issues. After they have too big a list of things they don’t like about the defaults, they go back to their old editor, without ever learning of the existence of defaults packages. Which is a shame.<p>Apart from defaults, I agree that GUI text editors provide no advantage to <i>completely</i> new users. But I’m not sure that “<i>new</i> users” of text editors, unfamiliar with OS conventions, is a category worth talking about – I think it’s really small. It shouldn’t take more than a year for a new computer user to absorb the OS conventions while browsing the web and writing documents. And how many people might want to try out Emacs within their first year of using a computer?<p>I guess that about 10% of eventual programmers started trying out programming in their first year of computer use – the other programmers started later in life. The number of fledgling programmers who care about editors enough to look into Emacs has to be even less than that – it’s probably something like 1% of all programmers. The other 99% of programmers will find GUI editors more familiar than Emacs, because they have already internalized the conventions.