I imagine all three are superior to TM2, especially Vim and Emacs, after you bust through the learning curve no point ever going back.
Programming on a laptop dramatically changes the cost/benefit of keyboard-heavy interfaces, IMHO. E.g. it's almost as quick for me to flick the cursor to switch tabs as it is to type a chorded keyboard shortcut to switch buffers, especially factoring in the ability to look and think about what buffer I want before initiating any movement.
Also, on KDE at least, Emacs has both a very nice GUI and fullscreen support.
Finally, I am now using a 13" laptop, and using the keyboard is still more efficient despite the really nice touchpad my new computer has.
Hah. Try doing that when you have 782 open buffers. :-)
Also, Emacs doesn't have real Lion full screen support, but try "M-x set-variable RET ns-auto-hide-menu-bar RET t RET" which comes close.
It doesn't come close at all. It takes over the primary desktop which results in very weird behavior with the Dock. Which is, ultimately, the thing that drives me up the wall about Emacs. It doesn't behave like an OS X app, and the token GUI support is fiddly and jarring (lack of smooth scrolling, etc). Now that other editors are upping the ante in terms of scriptability (Sublime Text has an awesome Python API, too bad its closed-source), the reasons to stick with Emacs are rapidly decreasing for me.
Not sure what you mean. It's pre-Lion style full-screen, not weird at all. It just hides the menu and the dock.
I'm not sure I agree that Emacs's GUI support is "token" but I would admit to it not being the emphasis of the program. I give them a lot of credit for having a Mac port in the main codebase and keeping 3 or 4 disparate GUIs in sync with each other.
Scrolling with the trackpad is crazy fast by default, I had to slow it down with the "mouse-wheel-scroll-amount" customization (I only did this after multiple years because it doesn't matter that much in the end--I realized that if I'm using the mouse in Emacs I'm generally doing something wrong).
Smooth scrolling is anathema to Emacs which doesn't even let you resize the window in sub font-height increments. I don't think that decision is necessarily correct but I think it probably comes from Emacs's heritage as a terminal program. I think smooth scrolling could be nice. I do have to say that in the long run C-v, M-v, and C-s end up being way faster and more accurate than 2 finger scrolling.
A funny aside, I did one of the first (if not the first) port of Emacs to OS X back in the Mac OS X Beta days and someone sent me an email saying the menubar was blank--there were no menus in the program. The funny part was I had released it and had been using it as my main text editor for weeks and I never even noticed. :-)
Please note that the patch is not mine, so credits to the author.
Five years is a long time.