I can't tell if you are trying to be ironic or not.

You want something intuitive to a novice and your example is EMACS?

I use EMACS everyday. C code, Haskell code, Lilypond markup, even using search and replace to hack Pure Data files sometimes. Love it, been on board for years.

You are out of your mind if you think it's software that a novice is going to immediately be able to solve problems with.