Master Emacs in one year

I don't know who Marc is teaching, but you would be astonished by how many undergrads in a computer information systems course do not know what a text file is. They'll take a programming course with C# in Visual Studio, and come away thinking that you can only program in Visual Studio with Visual Studio files. Then you get them in a database course the next semester and assign them some SQL, and they'll try to write their scripts in Word.

Can't blame them for not learning what the previous teachers didn't teach, but I'd sure blame myself if they got to day 2 in my class and I didn't correct it. Now I tend to start my classes by haranguing them to install Notepad++ or whatever alternative exists for Mac users.

I'm getting a little sick of Notepad++ and this thread has me thinking I should give emacs a try. (Probably not for my students though!)

I'm a current undergrad at MIT and I still see it (and use Emacs myself). Vim and Sublime are more popular though. Vim and Sublime are probably around equal, followed by Emacs.

Eclipse has emacs-style key bindings. So you can have the best of both worlds.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize this doesn't really directly respond to "IDE replacement" - honestly I don't write much code any more so some of the below doesn't apply to that. When I wrote code, the main benefit of emacs was that it abstracted me a bit from the nuances of different IDEs for different languages / platforms and was good at generalizing interactions with the compiler / errors / objects. A really good IDE would be better at many certain things than emacs, but emacs was marginally better all around. I used it for C, perl, and a little C++.

1) "the kitchen sink" thing, which is commonly cited as a drawback, is (to me) emacs most compelling feature. If this isn't compelling to someone, then a lot of the rest of emacs probably won't be, either.

There's a learning curve to doing everything in emacs. I've written some guides on it before to ease the transition to starting to use it (basically introducing a few very important basic concepts that introduce major and minor modes, keybindings, and how to investigate those and customize them), but when you have that core understanding down, when you realize that you can apply those same concepts to everything you do - it's incredibly, incredibly powerful and you understand why people want to live in emacs.

eshell or shell-mode for your shell interactions is amazing. searching through a shell buffer with emacs' regexes or incremental search is fantastic. Running your whole shell in that buffer and being able to run simple but useful commands like "occur" (essentially letting you grep through multiple preceding lines of output) is something I use all the time. The commands to jump up / down through the buffer to prior prompts in the shell history - all of that stuff is great.

Similarly, using dired (directory editor) as my shell browser is great. If I need to do a batch file rename, I could jump through some hoops to do this with shell script one-liners or something, but putting dired into editable mode and then treating the file names simply like text and using search & replace operations the same way I would on regular content in a file is a natural, fast, and powerful operation.

And of course all of these are the same commands and same environment as I have for editing text.

I don't do everything in emacs but I do as much as I can in it. And I didn't mention org-mode but I use it for 100% of my note taking and publishing to HTML - it's incredibly awesome.

for me one of the important feature is the ability run in a terminal over ssh on a slow link.