[hellofunk]

I used to use Xcode for all my work. Then I had to write Clojure for a couple years, and only used Emacs. When I got back to writing native code, I went back to Xcode and ironically felt like I had slipped into the distant past. So I switched to CLion, the latest bells-and-whistles IDE for C++. But all my custom Emacs code was too powerful an adversary for even CLion and I am back to using Emacs full-time for C and C++.

One caveat: I now use vim-mode in Emacs ("evil") which really has taken my Emacs experience to a new level.

[pvinis]

I have been trying to replace Xcode with Emacs, but the biggest problem I don't know how to solve, has been Cocoa/ObjC/clang autocomplete. If I could have that work like Xcode, I could probably switch tomorrow.

[hellofunk]

I too tried to get autocomplete going in Emacs, and that is the biggest challenge. However, I quickly realized that autocomplete is overrated. I am no less productive without it. In fact, the "snippet" module for Emacs has allowed me to be a lot more productive by generating keystrokes that complete common language idioms for me quickly. In C++, for example, using push_back is very common, and an autocomplete could help with this simple function call, but my snippet goes further and does so more quickly with fewer keystrokes.

Autocomplete even on a major IDE on a fast machine can sometimes still take an extra second to pop up. I can type faster than that, and I can certain snippet a lot faster than that.

Other things like all the different ways to write for loops (the types of iteration) I have snippetized so I can quickly generate the loop I need, which goes much further than autocomplete would.