I am glad you were not offended. I try to be careful with what I say, and never intentionally offend, though I can be controversial at times! ;-)

I have used GNU Emacs as a Web browser. It is OK for text only pages, similar to what you would access with links or lynx. Performance is not very good. On the other hand, Emacs has an excellent news reader, and I actually prefer reading news from Emacs whenever I can. Emacs also has an Email reader. Actually, it has SEVERAL Email clients. One is an extended feature of the Gnus news reader, and that is the most interesting one. There is also a GUI mail reader called VM, a classic Email reader called RMAIL, and an interface to the Rand Mail Handler (MH) called mh-e. Very rich Email environment and a very useful, if unconventional, environment.

These days, there are lots of text editors that highlight text and use color for keywords and syntax. GNU Emacs has always been among the leaders in this space. Even if a language comes along that Emacs doesn't handle, there are scripts for each language that can readily be written and/or adapted from existing scripts to support additional languages, so Emacs has great flexibility in this space.

No doubt about it, the greatest strength for Emacs is when you are utilizing multiple features. It is a very powerful editor in its own right, but dedicated editors may be more appropriate for specific features.

Frankly, I use multiple editors as well. As my overall editor, I do go with Emacs, but I certainly do not hesitate to use various dialects of Vi, as well as GUI based editors on various platforms, including desktop editors.

just vim it!
vim has every feature an editor/IDE needs, light weighted, stable, ...

Other notable emacs features I personally use alot are: mp3 playing (emms) and IRC client (ERC) and Shell/Terminal (M-x shell, M-x ansi-term), and screen (elscreen).

It can be nice to have a split-screen buffer setup with two source files (think c++ source and header for example), have auto completion and intellisense-like features, but then also a small IRC buffer to talk to fellow developers, and a different screen with an mp3 playlist buffer, and a volume control buffer.

You can switch between your developer screen and your music screen, and when a song changes it's announced in the status line while you are in your developer screen.

I think I should try out some of these Gnu Emacs features for myself. It's very easy to get into a comfort zone and stay there but I won't know whether I'll like these things till I actually make that effort.

I know it's to late to vote but I have to say that Emacs is easier on command line begginers so I used to use it alot. now I log in graphically, open xterm and use vim from the command line

I think your right about emacs suiting beginners and it's probably related to the fact that it's so similar to bash hence less confusing for a newbie.

It may be easier to get started, but to extend emacs to make use of all the powerful features and lisp extentions out there I found it harder to figure out than vim,... Vim's .vimrc is rather humanly readable while emacs' configuration file is written in lisp.

Believe it or not, some humans actually do write (and read) Lisp.

No editor can beat the mighty ee :P

One nice thing about vi is that it's installed on pretty much any *nix OS, so vi is very cross platform.

I prefer the nice and simple nano editor though.

vim is the best

I used to be an Emacs user, but recently switched to vi. Before people cast me as John Kerry I want to say that I was getting muscle cramps in my little finger, for CONSTANTLY having to hold down the Ctrl key. Sure you pound the Esc key in vim like a "sweet piece of Veal" (any arrested development fans here?), but there's never a need to hold down a key so far out of reach. Vim is the way of the future.

Where is the mighty e3? Vi, emacs, pico, wordstar and nedit emulation and a calculator all in 10,812 bytes. Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Win9x, QNX, Atheos, BeOS, ELKS, and DOS.

Just the thing to stress-test your new 4GB quad core system.

You are probably using a PC keyboard without remapping any keys. If you had a keyboard with the Ctrl key where God intended it (i.e, above the shift key, next to the "A") then you would find it much easier to do. There are various and sundry easy ways to do this, you might consider trying one, and then your little finger cramps will go away.

Cheers.
Jim

for editing text in a terminal & CLI mode i prefer midnight commander's mcedit (has excellent syntax highlighting)...


for a GUI text editor my favorite is NEdit (has excellent syntax highlighting & macros and uses ispell for spell checking),..