[Aykroyd]

I've been hot and cold on emacs over the years. I've used it enough that there is a lot that I really like about it and that I'm annoyed by not having in other editors. But that list of links is the reason why ultimately I have decided to spend my time in a different editor.

Yes anything is possible and people have done work that probably intersects with what you're looking to do. But rarely does anything just work.

I spend too much time try to make things work and re-implementing features that exist in other environments. I tend to use Textmate and Intellij -- although extending Intellij is such a heavy process that I pretty don't do it.

[kroger]

"But that list of links is the reason why ultimately I have decided to spend my time in a different editor."

Actually most of the functionalities I mentioned are available out-of-the-box. Ediff just works. Version control just works. I sent a long list of links so people could have a better idea how these features work. It's true, though, that emacs doesn't have everything out-of-the-box and you need to download and install and configure things, but the same is true for every single editor and IDE out there.

[Aykroyd]

True ediff, vc-dir, and ecb are all in there. And I can only speak for my own work-flow but with each of those I needed to make modifications to have it work in a way that I liked. And ultimately never got to a place where I was totally happy (except with ediff).

I do believe that people have gotten it configured just right and that they are extremely productive with it. But for me there was just always one more thing that I needed to do from change the appearance slightly or override the annoying way that vc-dir takes over existing windows. I end up just wishing that the defaults were a little bit better.