I'm more interested in why people insist on GUI Emacs.
Way back when I decided to first try out Linux (and then ended up using it for most of this millennium before taking a job which provided me with a Mac laptop), it took me a bit to get accustomed to doing most things from a terminal window (and I was fortunate in that the all-singing, all-dancing GUI automation stuff of modern Linux distros didn't exist yet), but once I was comfortable with it I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.
But then I also laughed when I saw the fad for "full-screen" text editing on the Mac a while back; when I want to hack or write I don't have to tune out, say, IRC or email because Emacs is running in one window of my screen session and IRC and email are running in others where I don't see them unless I'm actually using them :)
I like GUI Emacs because keys like C-/ work, even if they have no ASCII code, and I don't have to wonder if I'm going to get random backslashes if I try to copy and paste into another window. There really isn't that much difference between switching between Emacs and, say, IRC, by using Alt-Tab or ^A ^A.
Way back when I decided to first try out Linux (and then ended up using it for most of this millennium before taking a job which provided me with a Mac laptop), it took me a bit to get accustomed to doing most things from a terminal window (and I was fortunate in that the all-singing, all-dancing GUI automation stuff of modern Linux distros didn't exist yet), but once I was comfortable with it I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.
But then I also laughed when I saw the fad for "full-screen" text editing on the Mac a while back; when I want to hack or write I don't have to tune out, say, IRC or email because Emacs is running in one window of my screen session and IRC and email are running in others where I don't see them unless I'm actually using them :)