The Emacs editor predates
Linux, and was once far more popular, but it
has fallen into relative obscurity over the years.
In a mega-thread on the emacs-devel mailing list, participants discussed
various ideas for making Emacs more “attractive”, in both aesthetic
and in “appealing to more users” senses of that term. Any improvements
to Emacs in that regard have numerous hurdles to overcome, however. There
are technical questions and, naturally, licensing considerations, but
there is also the philosophical question of what it is, exactly, that stops
the venerable text editor from being more popular.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Making Emacs popular again