Difference: EmacsTips (15 vs. 16)

Emacs is more than an editor - it's a lifestyle. I spent years using vi but have fairly recently started to make the investment to join the cult. I prefer emacs to IDE's because I feel that the investment in time that I spend learning it will be more likely to pay off because emacs has been around for a long time and will continue to be around for a long time. Also, more of the smartest people I've worked with have used emacs than all other development environments combined (although lately Eclipse is gaining).

• Apple: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/carbonemacspackage.html

• Aquamacs: http://aquamacs.org/ - heavily customized to be more mac-like.

Windows - you can use cygwin's bash as a shell within emacs by putting c:\cygwin\bin in your windows path before running emacs. this link might also help.