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How much can Emacs change while still being Emacs? Is it worthwhile to start building a new editor on the core Emacs "idea"? Because I think minor changes will not move the needle. Someone compared it with the birth of Firefox, scrapping Netscape Mozilla Communicator or whatever it was called. I think that is what it would take but even that would be uncertain.

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I have used emacs for decades so I do not see the need for a big restart, but your question does remind me of something RMS said years ago. I cannot find the exact quote, but the essence of it was that any editor that offered the programmability of emacs was worthy of the name regardless of its keybindings, etc. In that sense I do not believe there would be any problem with emacs following the model of Fortran; it can look and behave quite different, but at its core it has to be open and accessible for the user to extend and adapt.

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