In earlier days, my wife was given email by telnetting to an SGI system
and using elm. One day, I visited her office as she was composing a
message. Intrigued, I asked her what the editor was. She did not know
and pointed to her cheat-sheet listing editor commands. One was ^X^C to
exit-and-send. She is not a programmer and I was a bit surprised at
their choice.
Hmm, I'm actually kind of not. Starting users off with a modal editor (that starts in command mode, no less!) can be surprising for novices; with emacs, at least you can start typing text and, well, see text.
I think that one of the smartest things Marc Crispin ever did was write `pico` to go with `pine`. A simple editor targeted at the novice was really useful for casual and/or new users, particularly as the Internet spread and an account on a Unix system was the default introduction to email etc for so many.
- Dan C.