Moving from visual studio to emacs..

I never quite used emacs, but to me it's mostly for pure linux fanboys who like to do everything manually, like people saying they code everything under VI or notepad. Of course, emacs is much better with syntax highlighting and useful keyboard shortcuts, but seriously in my opinion I would never trade Visual Studio for that. What I do and what I recommend is doing all the coding on Windows with VS, use cross-platform libraries the most you can to be able to compile under windows, and use SVN or direct file sharing (if you don't want to commit every 2sec) to share your source with your linux machine / vmware image. Use the linux environment only to build and test, not to code.

You cant really compare people saying they use notepad to people using Emacs Emacs is a really powerfull editor, but it takes time to learn it..

I will for sure work on linux at times with my engine as its cross platform and I do some low level platform dependent programming.. I wouldn't develop that on windows.. at work I only work under linux as thats what our system runs..

For VCS I use git..

Personally i prefer vim over emacs (being in commandmode by default beats having to press CTRL+whatever all the time) but when possible i'll go with an IDE that has commandbased editing as an option(QTCreator has this functionality built in, while VS and Eclipse has plugins for it).

For emacs you can look at this: http://python.about.com/b/2007/09/24/emacs-tips-for-python-programmers.htm
For vim you can look at this: http://dancingpenguinsoflight.com/2009/02/python-and-vim-make-your-own-ide/

Be prepared to spend some time learning the shortcuts and configuring the editor to suit your workflow (Both editors can be insanely powerful if you configure them properly)

You cant really compare people saying they use notepad to people using Emacs Emacs is a really powerfull editor, but it takes time to learn it..

Indeed - and it seems odd to say you have to do things "manually" in emacs, on the contrary, one thing about emacs is that it is very powerful in the way it can do all sorts of things for you.

Personally I'm more happier with simpler things like the VS editor, and emacs probably has a steeper learning curve. But there is nothing manual about it, and a comparison to notepad isn't fair in my opinion.

If you're going to try emaces, you should install the cedet packages -- these add lots of extensions like class/routine folding arrows and so on. Makes the whole thing tons nicer -- and I liked emacs before finding them :-)