He had a keyboard with important keys on both sides of the spacebar because the assumption was that a user would interact with the computer in sophisticated ways such as or similar to programming. Most current keyboards are designed for cost saving or consumption or just by copying mediocre designs that are common.
I write software for 20 years, I use Linux and OS X as my primary development desktop OS, I have used Slackware Linux 1.0 back in 1995, I am a touch typist — but I just can't stay using Vim or Emacs, unless forced to (such as when I have to quickly edit something on a remote machine).
Yes, I might be a special snowflake — most developers don't have problems with vim or Emacs, expect for occasional flame wars between the two. But I do, even as I tried to make the switch like 20 or more times.
My comment was only to clarify that the keyboards have changed over the years and that historically, there was a more rational basis for the keybinding ergonomics than it might seem today. Part of the reason that Emacs is configurable is that there were lots of different keyboard layouts many years ago and the design view was that there is no one right way. One of the things I like about Emacs is that the philosophy of many right ways is consistent with mine and I don't think there is one right way of editing text and hence there is no one right text editor.
What I like about Emacs is that I can use it with just about any programming or semi-programming language I come across without having to learn a new IDE or editor. The other thing I like is that the capability ceiling of the tool is so high that I am constantly making significant progress in terms of efficiency. So the cost of learning it, was and is worth it for me. If I was writing Java or C# or Pharo most of the time, I'd probably uses different tools.
Why would you even try to make a switch to Emacs? It's kind of ok as a text editor, but, by default, it's nothing special. The default keybindings are stupid all the time they aren't malicious, that's true, and it has other problems, like archaic UIs (eg. completion, M-x, Speedbar).
The situation changes drastically once you account for two things:
1. The plugins. I said it many times already here on HN, but my Emacs is running 900k loc of Elisp, where more than 500k loc are plugins (or extensions, applications, and libraries). When modern packaging systems appeared, for both Emacs and Vim, their ecosystems were already formidable - it only got better since then.
2. Customization. It's not, in my opinion, worth learning Emacs if you're not going to customize it. The defaults are awful, that's one of the few things I agree with Xah on. But the ease of configuration and extension makes up for it if you're willing to put some hours into it. Not into "learning Emacs", but into "learning how to customize Emacs". The latter - if you're a programmer - is also more fun than memorizing arbitrary keybindings which don't necessarily make any sense for your keyboard, hand size and other factors.
It's, of course, a trade-off, as you have to put some effort into it and you're starting from a rather low point. You could try one of Emacs "starter kits", but, honestly, they involve just as much memorization as the vanilla version and (as mentioned) I don't find it fun at all.
Still, the smoothness of your workflow that you can achieve with Emacs once you do customize it is astonishing. It's still not pretty like VSCode (just one example I recently played with), but it doesn't have almost any limitations to what it can do with a single press of a key. It can make minutes or sometimes hours of your work time collapse into seconds (well, as long as you tell it how).
If you didn't already - if anything I wrote here is news to you - you could give Emacs another try. Of course, if you're not opposed to spending some time tinkering with it until it feels just right.
