Over the past year or so I've seen a movement towards switching to Emacs on Mac OS X, often away from TextMate. While I understand the motivation for switching away from TextMate (TM2 is more or less vaporware), I don't really understand the appeal of Emacs. I recognize that it's an extremely powerful editor, but it does not integrate with the operating system very well, uses different key commands than most other applications, and has a heck of a learning curve.
With a preponderance of other programmer's text editors on Mac OS X (BBEdit, Sublime Text, Xcode) and some promising upcoming ones (Chocolat, Kod) what is the appeal of Emacs to someone that does not live in a terminal and does not have the muscle memory for it (yet)?
Best Answer
IMO, if you have a UNIX background with previous experience with Emacs, it might make sense to "carry it forward" onto OS X. As a new text editor, I personally don't think it makes sense. Yes, it is a fully capable text editor and it can do everything, but as you've said, it does not integrate well into the OS, which for me is a major hurdle.
I use vim on OS X because its my editor of choice on Linux (where I do much of the work that earns me money), however with that said, I've started learning and using BBEdit.