I once helped organize talks at my school, and helped with bringing Richard Stallman to give a talk one time. I was a vim user, but I did a little bit of prep and refreshed my emacs memory etc. So we're setting up the room for the talk, and we're talking a bit, and some people start to arrive. He asks one if they've ever used emacs, she says no, so I said, "we should start an emacs tutorial here, we can teach everyone about things like C-x C-c, and stuff". I just blurted out the only thing I had remembered recently. He turned a cold shoulder to me, I suppose thinking that I had insulted him directly. I ran out to Google what I had said, and then felt terrible about it, but it was too late. That's my remembering how to quit emacs story.
I'll first admit I'm a worshiper of the Church of Emacs.
I told the trying to exit vi joke for years until someone pointed out to me that C-x C-c was equally if not more obscure. It was a part of me because that was the first thing I ever learned about Emacs. Just like :wq was the first thing I ever learned about vi.
Now, I think the fact that people seem to have more difficulty exiting vi is because vi is very likely the fallback for $VISUAL/$EDITOR, and hence much more likely to be trapped in by accident when unprepared.
Emacs is definitely difficult to exit from. The difference is emacs usually isn't the default/fallback EDITOR on the system, so you rarely get dropped into it unknowingly/unexpectedly.
Also: Emacs is rarely if ever used in the terminal today, and exiting it through the standard desktop protocol ([X], Ctrl-[Shift]-Q, Alt+F4, ...) always works.
I use emacs in a terminal all the time (usually in a tmux session, actually). That's how I learned it (in pre-GUI days) and so it feels pretty natural. I never use the mouse with emacs, even in a GUI session.
Note that GUI emacs doesn't mean using a mouse. I use GUI emacs but almost never interact with it with a mouse, I just have a server-enabled emacs running fullscreen in one of my virtual desktops.
We get so many people using it in terminals in #emacs. Obviously there's no way to know how many people are not using it in a terminal because they won't be asking GUI-specific questions. I and a few others do try to discourage the terminal users and nudge them towards the GUI which is more featureful, but some people really want to use a terminal at all costs.
I don't think that's true. System administrators will happily use it in a terminal. I'd often deliberately run emacs -nw when something requires a quick edit and the GUI would be imposing.
My anecdotal experience has been that no matter how many times I'm told how to exit Emacs I can't remember but every developer I have taught '<esc>:wq' to has remembered it after one or two times telling them what it is.
A MIDI foot controller isn't a musical keyboard (though such things do exist, mimicing organ pedals). It's used for MIDI program changes. I have a MIDI programmable guitar pre-amp, and so in combination with this pedal, I have access to various amp settings just by stepping on various buttons.
It's too easy to hit accidentally, though. I got burned by it a few times, so I eventually unbound the command. I now use M-x kill-emacs when I want to quit (very rarely, anyway).
C-x C-e evaluates the Emacs Lisp expression before the point. This gives the same result as the much more obvious M-x kill-emacs, but with the added fun of writing and executing Lisp directly in whatever buffer you're in. So to close the editor, we've written some code in a weird ancient language into some random text file, fired up an interpreter that's probably so portable you can run it on a 1980s toaster, and executed an expression which we had to make sure was wrapped in those vile parentheses everyone loves to hate.
Straightforward.
But I just had to explain my own joke, so I'll go wallow in shame for the rest of the day. :(
