”So, Emacs pretends it has constant time access into its UTF-8 text data, but it’s only faking it with some simple optimizations. This usually works out just fine.”
Usually, except when you’re writing in, and searching for Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Turkish, etc, text, like 50+% of the world’s population? It seems Emacs is made for programmers, who predominantly type and search for ascii text.
Some people use Emacs just for Org. That's a lot closer to a shopping list than to programming. And programmers sometimes write text in natural language.
I would guess that the parent comment's point is still true: Emacs (and Vim) are far more commonly used for programming and other work, probably ASCII heavy, than for natural language text editing.
I'd be willing to bet that for both Emacs and Vim, 90%+ characters by volume are ASCII. I wouldn't make a similar bet for Microsoft Word.
Usually, except when you’re writing in, and searching for Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Turkish, etc, text, like 50+% of the world’s population? It seems Emacs is made for programmers, who predominantly type and search for ascii text.