As part of my switch from (GNU/) Linux to OS X, I’ve considered making my switch complete, and moving from Emacs to Textmate. I’ve heard that Textmate is basically Emacs for OS X, except nicer looking.
When I started using it though, I realized what an overstatement that is. Sure, Textmate may be featurefull, may be a straight text editor, etc, but it’s no Emacs. The biggest problem I have with it is modal dialogue boxes: One of the great strengths of Emacs is the fact that *everything* is a buffer. This is vital to a seamlessly powerful experience, because it means that all the editing power you have when writing code—incremental search, goto-line, completion, etc—is available to you in the dialogues. It is difficult to convey how wonderful this is, and how incredibly jarring it is to go from that to having to mouse through a menu to, say, find a file.
There are some other issues I have, such as default keybindings aggravating me (C-j apparently bound to “collapse-the-whole-file-into-one-line” instead of, say, “newline-and-indent”, and so on (I was also going to complain about C-h being help instead of delete-backwards-char, but then I remembered that’s also the default emacs behaviour…)), but those I’d be able to work around. Modal dialogues…is kind of a killer issue for me.
