Giving up on emacs
Well, not entirely – but after about 10 years as an emacs fan, I’m giving up on it as my default gui text editor.
The reason? It’s just too darn ugly on an LCD, and all my work machines now use LCDs. There is no anti-aliased text or subpixel rendering without pain – quite a bit of pain. Gnu emacs has xft font support – in a cvs patch that is reported as being quite unstable. Xemacs has xft font support, in the latest release – if you compile it yourself, with lots of manual fiddling of config settings.
So what am I using, you ask? Vi? Nope – I’m using jEdit http://www.jedit.org/
– it’s Java Swing based, so I get anti-aliased fonts out of the box. It works over X so I can run it from a remote server – and sadly, I work on more unix boxes that have Java than boxes that have emacs, so it’s easier to run jEdit – it will happily install and run as a standard user.
And it has an apt repository so it’s pretty easy to install in Ubuntu, once you’ve gotten over the messy business of installing Java.
And if I go to beta versions of Java 1.6 and jEdit, I can have subpixel rendering, for maximal prettiness.
Also, I find it slightly easier to write hacks in Java and BeanShell? than elisp 
I’ll probably still use emacs in text mode for some stuff – my fingers have memorised all the keystrokes But jEdit is now going to be the default.
I suspect more and more things are going to go this way, for me at least. Java provides a portable platform that makes installation and configuration so much easier than unix or windows binary-compatibility-hell.