I too turn off the menu and toolbar in Emacs, and I'm not saying the setup in the article sounds good to me for that or any editor. But to give you an example of why I think it's an important point, I would absolutely love to be able to issue commands by speech, for example, for things I don't use very often, or just never remember what I've bound them to (or even for stuff I don't remember the name for). Some people _have_ this setup, I've just never invested the time. But it's possible because fundamentally Emacs is a platform first and an editor second. I doubt it would be a very popular platform without the ability to make keybindings, but you nevertheless you could still build useful apps on top of it, and I find that quite interesting.

> a lot of these commands actually take parameters that would be difficult to provide by mouse.

Those that take interactive strings, maybe - but for those that take buffer positions or regions, which seems to me like a plurality if not majority, I would love to be able to invoke a command and then click+drag somewhere I want to apply, rather than having to set the point there and pop it back when done.

Or the other way around, select a region, right-click to get a choice of commands that work on regions - this could even be auto-generated by looking at the keymap stack for commands that work on regions.