You misread my McDonald's analogy. Einstein once perfectly formulated the meaning of it: "What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right". Besides, Emacs is not as unpopular in "the real world" as you think.

You may say it's purely anecdotal. Even label me a confirmation bias gull. But let me tell you my "anecdote". I've been programming for over two decades, and until around 2013, I was just like you. I've never seen anyone using Emacs. I've heard about it. I read some news on the Internet but have never seen it in the wild. And one day, I took a flight from New York to San Francisco. My next-seat guy opened a laptop and started typing things in Emacs. I just couldn't help it. I pretended to be asleep and kept peeking. After forty minutes of that lame game, I simply couldn't hold it anymore and started asking questions. Until that point in my career, I haven't seen anyone coding like that guy - without googling things; without StackOverlfow; without constantly jumping between documentation, terminal console, utility apps, and the editor. It was all in one place. It was clean and strangely ascetic - no toolbars or menu, no icons, no progress bars, no multitude of numbers indicating different things. Another thing that fascinated me was how easily he manipulated window panes using only the keyboard. Clearly, he was "in the zone" - it seemed as if he had zero context switching. That was very different from how I wrote code and most of my colleagues as well. And he wasn't using some esoteric, little-known language. He was writing in Golang. I didn't know it; still, it wasn't some completely alien thing to me.

That flight, though, wasn't enough to inspire me to try Emacs. Soon enough, I forgot about it. Three months later, I made a jump in my career. At my new job, there were a handful of Emacs users. I learned many new things from them (unrelated to Emacs). And that's when I installed Emacs on my machine for the first time. It still would take me another two years to transition. A year later, I got a great offer and bounced again. Better salary, a better workplace, a more prominent company, different kinds of challenges, tougher team - plainly an upgrade from every perspective. In this team, I had more than two dozen developers using Emacs. And that turned out to be a reoccurring pattern for me. With every new team, the more experienced and seasoned developers in it - the chance for more Emacsers would increase. In my current team, most of the devs (more than a few dozen) use Emacs. We have exactly one person using Neovim (there were two, but one left), one VSCode, and a single IntelliJ person. There are probably more non-emacs people here, but in the groups of my immediate proximity, there's an uncontested Emacs majority.

No, I'm not saying that non-Emacs users are lesser and that every self-esteemed coder absolutely has (at least) to try Emacs. Or that it is guaranteed that Emacs would make you a better programmer. No, no. I'm not saying that. It's just, ... In my (of course, totally subjective) empirical experience, programmers using Emacs generally tend to be very good at what they do.

> I don't understand why you're arguing that McDonald's isn't the best

So you see? It's just like Einstein said - "... it is not always right." For you, McDonald's may feel "right" and might be "the best." Albeit, for me, it is not. Our "real worlds" - yours and mine, differ. Today they do. Tomorrow, that may change.