All of the things that you list here are what Emacs is not. Above all, Emacs is an investment -- not a two week investment, but one that you'll need a year bef

All of the things that you list here are what Emacs is not. Above all, Emacs is an investment -- not a two week investment, but one that you'll need a year before it's really an extension of the way you code. Here are some other additional notes: - You can get it on every platform. I personally use XEmacs (though I'd recommend GNU Emacs for people starting now) and it's exactly the same on Mac, Windows and Linux. - Many of the old Emacs die-hards learned Emacs in a time when Emacs had just as good a GUI as anything else. So a lot of our rhetoric comes from an era when everything was driven by keyboard shortcuts. I do, however, believe that learning how to use your editor from the keyboard alone does improve long-term efficiency.