Everything in Emacs exists under the “M-x” keybind (M stands for Meta which is usually Alt on linux and Option on macOS). Because everything you can do is a command (which are just normal functions that have been annotated). Then you have bindings to directly execute those functions instead of going through a prompt.

There’s some terminology to learn to make sense of the commands. And the default keybindings are also useful to learn (and you can find them in anything that uses the readline library and equivalent: Bash, zsh, psql,…. You can also find them in macOS text widgets).

But the thing is that Emacs have a lot of commands. They are assembled into packages and due to the nature of Elisp, can be edited and patched live. While it easy to get started (videos on youtube, the emacs documentation, the “Mastering Emacs” book), After a while, you config can become alien to anyone else. But it will stay discoverable as Emacs have a great help system.

"and you can find them in anything that uses the readline library and equivalent: Bash, zsh, psql,…. You can also find them in macOS text widgets"

If anything, this is what pushed me towards emacs vs having to learn separate keybinds for vim/neovim. I wanted a terminal based TUI text editor that followed the conventions of keybinds I already understood. I switch from Mac to Windows to Linux quite often, and I am constantly hitting ^+a to get to the front of the line and constantly frustrated when it doesn't work on some OS or only works in some context. It's fantastic on macOS, ^+w does the same thing in my terminal that it does in my text editor that it does in my web browser that it does in my slide deck. It also works because macOS moved the common "CUA" shortcuts for the GUI apps to command/Super, so Ctrl isn't overloaded with shortcuts, leaving things like Ctrl+c to send a SIGTERM and Command+c to copy without fuss. Plug in a keyboard to an iOS device and they work over there most of the time too!

I wish it wasn't such a ballache to replicate this on Linux, even if the various forms of text fields in the GUI frameworks don't respect it.