emacs necessary before X, and still the best

Back in the '80s, before we had X, we worked on "glass ttys" connected to Unix computers with serial lines. Pretty much the only way we had to get two windows on the terminal was with emacs. I ran a debugger in a shell in one window, while looking at the source code in another. Those poor vi guys could run the debugger OR look at the source code, but couldn't do both at the same time.

I still like the way emacs is an IDE at the right level. It understands my personal indentation schemes for various languages (including plain TeX), and nicely integrates make and gdb, and lots of other stuff. The Lisp variant used internally isn't difficult, and is actually quite useful (though I deliberately don't depend too much on custom Lisp, as I need to work on many computers, and don't always have a thumb-drive with my .emacs).

I never liked the vi's "command" and "insert" modes. I keep forgetting which mode I'm in, typing long lines of C code while in "command" mode. Yikes.

Cultural theory: go to one of the few remaining places on the earth with indigenous, non-technical people who've lived in harmony for millenia, and teach them about computers until they have a rational basis for using text editors. At this point they will naturally fall into warring "vi" and "emacs" camps, losing their generations-long tradition of peaceful cooperation.