[greggman]

I would really like to understand your experience. I'm not an emacs guru by any measure. I currently only use it when I have to, not when I want to. I'm also not a VS fan for editing. But...With Visual Assist installed (and possibly even without it), I don't see how emacs compares. But then maybe I just don't know how to setup emacs. I'd love to know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hOztCPEi-0

[to3m]

I'd love to know too! I use Emacs for everything except C++, because I've never found anything that works as well for code navigation and completion as visual assist. (Setup time is a factor, I admit. I'm not saying visual assist isn't a bit ropey in places.)

(As a text editor Visual Studio isn't great but it's perfectly adequate and I generally get by by copying and pasting to and from Emacs if I need to do anything complicated.)

[dschiptsov]

Not sure if my answer would be better that those of Google search.

I could have a flexible, programmable good-enough DE for C/C++ with make, emacs+cedet+cc-mode on my netbook with a crappy AMD x86-64 CPU and 1.5Gb of available RAM. It works fine for navigating over my own code, when I know what I am doing and why.

I would not explain the wonders of emacs+slime+cmucl or emacs+cider+clojure-mode here. Just one hint: everything works on a [remote] text terminal via ssh,tmux,etc. Google does it better.

Eclipse, while it could start without any progect in a minute or so, is unusable for anything but menu navigation.

Moreover, there are people around who still believe that make and command line tools are still good enough.

My bet is that very complex software, like nginx or postgresql has been written in vi or emacs.