this screencast is the first thing that's made me seriously consider switching to Emacs from vi
It does everything else well, but coming from Vim you just need to accept you'll never edit text as well.
edit: And to add some of the best emacs I got was don't worry about closing buffers. Focus on work and ignore the window and buffer management. In the end you won't notice if you've got greps/acks, manpages, emails, or whatever open because you're too busy writing code.
The thing is I can't imagine thinking that, unless I was coming from vim.
Coming from any other style of "editor", I would think the text editing capabilities of emacs were really good.
Of course, I am coming from vim now, so I'm completely spoiled.
I don't know why this is being voted up. This is utter nonsense and not supported by any arguments.
Vim is excellent at editing text. Really really good at it. Emacs is not. It's better than this vanilla comment box in firefox for sure, but compared to Vim's modal editing it's a dog. People injure themselves typing in Emacs. It's actually dangerous!
And my comment was getting votes because people agreed until you came along with your meta comment.
All these things add up, and Vim may be efficient at copy/pasting/editing plain text, but on the whole I'm a lot more productive in Emacs.
Of course, Emacs's learning curve is so bad that sometimes I just wanna' give up and pick something else, like Textmate ... but then when I'm trying Textmate or anything else, I start missing Emacs ... in Emacs you can even undo-changes only on a region for fucks-sake, how can people work with that brain-dead undo functionality in Textmate is well beyond me.
It's a curse :)