I've been a casual user of Emacs forever. But I never gelled with it. I've always found its complexity a bit overwhelming. I learned the few things I needed.

I've been a casual user of Emacs forever. But I never gelled with it. I've always found its complexity a bit overwhelming. I learned the few things I needed. Things like read and write files, arrows to move, pgup, pgdown, ^S, ^R, M-X compile, ^K, ^Y -- honestly, that's about it, no doubt there are others, tab, auto-indent, paren matching. I've made a little progress using Slime for Lisp, or the scratch buffer, but tend to just fall back to save the file and reload. Emacs is infinitely customizable, and I don't customize things. To quote the Genie: "Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space!" That's the emacs I live in. I've never been comfortable with its chording control style. While everything is documented, it's not necessarily discoverable. Never got comfortable with its scrolling style. I always fumble with switching between buffers, particularly when it's more than just to and fro with ^X-b. There's a drop down menu on the menubar (on my Mac, I use stock Emacs), but it actually takes 2 clicks to use. And trying to set it up to develop Java is just...well, complicated. I originally used Emacs to write Java, back in the pre-IDE days. I liked its free syntax coloring, I liked that Ant worked with it, out of the box (maybe with -e for emacs messages or something). And I muddled with that for several years. Eventually I switched to NetBeans, and I can't do Java without all of the autocomplete and other gizmos NetBeans gives me out of the box. And why NetBeans rather than Eclipse? Because it works great out of the box, and I don't have to customize it (note earlier). Early Eclipse was plug-in mania. I won't give it up, I use it for my Lisp coding (auto-indent and paren matching mostly). But, I doubt I'll ever curl up with it.