On the good side, once you are used to the keys, the text editing part is pretty efficient. Also, you have access to a lot of the other modes once you want to

On the good side, once you are used to the keys, the text editing part is pretty efficient. Also, you have access to a lot of the other modes once you want to step out of the C++ tasks, to look at other files (makefiles, log files), keeping notes with org-mode, opening ftp windows, pretty-printing,.... Plus there's less behind the scene magic than in IDEs and you have access to everything to see where something breaks. It's not a black box the same way an IDE is. On the bad side, you'll have to spend time tweaking packages and so on to get IDE-similar goodies like autocomplete. I can't remember if there's a similar thing as a background compilation that highlight errors as you type. But the thing with emacs is that if you wonder about a plugin, there'a good chance it exists already.