There is a lot that modern IDEs do well, but uncluttered writing space isn’t one of them. Once you add the various views of your project, the debug window, the source control window and various other important panes you’re left with a tiny viewport into your code. The visual clutter can be disabled of course, but you’ll get it back sooner or later. When you switch back to debug mode or build mode, for example.

See here: Emacs development

Time to check if the Windows builds are already available, methinks.

It’s been mentioned in several places that GNU Emacs versions sometime after 23.1.50 do come with an integrated version of CEDET. While I think that’s a superb idea it unfortunately managed to break my setup, which relies on a common set of emacs-lisp files that I hold under version control and distribute across the machines I work on. Those machines have different versions of GNU-based Emacsen (pure GNU, Emacs/W32, Carbon Emacs etc) so I can’t rely on the default CEDET. Unfortunately when I got a new machine and put a GNU Emacs 23.2 on there, my carefully crafted (OK, I’m exaggerating) .emacs wouldn’t play ball because the built-in CEDET conflicted with the pre7 that I had already installed on that machine.

Yeah, yeah, I’m somewhat behind the curve again. Anyway, for those who, like me, do like the power of CEDET in their Emacsen, it appears that -pre7 has now been available for a little while.