How about TextMate? It's almost as good as Emacs from a power point of view, but nowhere near as painful to learn, and looks a treat too!
Also, emacs lets you redefine nearly any of the functionality on the fly without restarting (everything except the very core which is written in C). I'm not sure if TextMate can do that, as I try to use as little proprietary software as possible.
Serious question.
Ha, I thought, Vim will eat this for breakfast. chug chug, task manager, end task. :(
Right, I'll break out the Emacs. chug chug, task manager, end task. :(
Hmm, what else do I have. Notepad. opened in seconds. :)
Promptly followed by search and replace can't insert newlines. :(
perl -n -e "s/(</li>)/$1\n/g; print" big_page.html > big_page_with_lines.html
The point is you have to "get" it. There's a point of epiphany after you've been using it for a while where you realize that you're not just changing your tool, you're changing the way you work and think about problems. This is the moment where "usability" suddenly acquires an entirely new definition for you, and you're hooked.
But you need to junk TextMate first. You can't just try emacs, you have to live it, at least for a while. How's that for a zen answer? :)
I use TextMate rather than Emacs for the same reason I use Mac OS X rather than Linux. Emacs and Linux may be more powerful, but TextMate and Mac OS X enable me to get what I want done with less fuss, less time expenditure, and less random jaunts through strange configuration files to figure out why feature XYZ doesn't work. I use TM/OSX because they Just Work.
I'm well aware of the additional power that I could have with Emacs or Linux, but it's not worth the additional hassle.
Also, before comparing TextMate to a GUI editor or IDE, you might want to actually try it. Sounds like you haven't TextMate is a programmer's power editor on a similar standing to vi or Emacs. Maybe not quite as awesomely powerful as Emacs, but close enough to be suitable for most geeks.
Another analogy, this one for bike lovers out there: Emacs is like a Brooks saddle, because it's wildly uncomfortable to start with, but if you stick with it and work into it, it's the only saddle that conforms to your body. Once you break it in, you can never go back to another saddle for long rides, no matter how new and awesome it looks.
Re: Textmate vs. Emacs: It's like comparing Apples and Oranges. An orange juice producer will farm oranges, and an apple juice producer willf farm apples.
To the man using Textmate on OS X, you probably code Javascript an CSS, and might dabble in Rails or vice versa. The guy using Emacs might be doing this as well, but there is a good chance he's a hardcore AI Lisp hacker.
I am a web designer. I write CSS, XHTML, and JS. I deal with Django templates all day long, a web browser, and the remaining time is in the terminal. I'm more terminal oriented than most/all designers I know, but for the most part I am playing around in a GUI wonderland. I use Textmate. Textmate really truly is a powerful editor, I will not disagree. Textmate is hands down the best editor I have ever used, for all of the reasons you have suggested. But I won't deny that Emacs is probably also one of the best editors in the world.
My CTO/Partner/best friend uses Emacs. He's a python hacker. He writes python all day long. He's got a Thinkpad running Ubuntu and quite a few terminal windows. He's doing a totally different kind of work, interfacing with the back-end mostly while I deal with the front end. He swears by Emacs. I tend to think of Emacs more like an OS actually... you can play games in it, browse the web, use your term, check your mail, and edit all kinds of crap. It's extremely powerful. The sumo package contains a TON of extra stuff.
Anyway, no one can really say X editor is better than Y editor. Similar to the way a programmer will ultimately take on a certain language as his own, the same thing occurs with an editor. At some point learning or playing with a new editor is like learning a whole new language. Might as well get dropped smack dab in the middle of Spain, or throw out all of your Python/Ruby/insert-lang-here for Objective-C. It's the same kind of pain.
But I do agree that bloatware crap like Xcode and Eclipse are simply... crap.
Anyway hope some of that made sense. I might have gone off track a bit :/
For the record I am a huge fan of Textmate and use it religuiously. export EDITOR="mate -w" :)
Everything else is vim though, haha, sorry Emacs lovers.
"mate_wait" does not need a "-w"
I had a problem recently where crontab -e didn't like mate. mate_wait seems to work as an EDITOR value everywhere.
Spend a week in TextMate, and you will similarly “get it”, as many emacs power users already have.
And I'm a certified machead, so that was no object.
(I used both for several hours per day for Latex, C/C++ and Matlab)
Then, I started looking for Alternatives. I found MANY. But the one I really felt in love with is TextMate. Somehow, It just works for me... I love its design: This "Emacs the easy way" with beautiful text rendering and without icon-clutter. But that is probably just me. Everyone has to find his own solution.
Although your tone suggests you want to use this as a justification for sticking with TM, it sounds a point in favor of Emacs to me.
In other words, they are removed by default.