Thoughts on editors (Emacs in particular)
pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca
pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca
But, yeah, dead topic to me, I already chose my editor and could care less what someone else says, only if it's about a new one, then I may care.
It's not the "typing time" that good editors save you, it's the "thinking time" they save since you're not forced to think much about them.
When I was forced to switch from Visual Studio 6 to VS2003, my productivity really suffered. Things did not work the way I wanted and I kept cold-rebooting my brain after every little interruption. Now I'm switching to vim and while it may not be as "fast" for certain tasks, its consistency and transparency makes me forget it's there. Besides, by not relying on arrow keys, pageup/down, del/ins and so on, vim allows me to be equally productive on unknown keyboards, especially on laptops, easily switching computers, which I happen to do quite often.
Historically a lot of useless dogma and arguments have surrounded the choice of editor. There is a desire to avoid that sort of low-quality discussion.
The Emacs/vi/IntelliJ/Eclipse/Netbeans/Kate/jEdit/TextPad debate is meaningless, because all the above choices are "good enough". However, a decent programmer's productivity will be severely hampered by Notepad. Similarly, the Rails/Django/Pylons debate is pointless, but choosing JSF can easily kill your project.
To the extent that it becomes a religious discussion about which one is the best, which happens all the time, I think you're right. However, the exchange of ideas that results can be meaningful. This is especially true of emacs, since there's so much room to use it creatively, but is applicable to all those other editors as well.
But that doesn't mean I find the discussion on this page interesting. Editors are very utilitarian, and for some reason lots of people talk about them. Feel free to have at it. I'll refrain from comment and up-votes.