Exposé breaks down when you have a hundred buffers open, though. iswitchb cuts through that like a bullet through butter.
The mouse is better for some things (especially relative/spatial stuff), and the keyboard for others, but interfaces that make you switch back and forth are clearly problematic. Rather than popping up dialog boxes and alerts, Emacs displays results (such as compiler output) in another buffer. If it needs immediate input, it uses the minibuffer, a one-line buffer at the bottom of the screen.
In either case, its full text-editing functionality is available. You can run a directory browser/editor, a web browser, shell, interpreter, e-mail client, irc client, etc., and it's just another text window.
Ok after watching that link and reading these comments i'm starting to understand a little. I installed Aquamacs (other emacs clients were too ugly IMO). I can see that emacs perhaps had a lot of features Visual Studio had BEFORE vs, and that it's a stable, multi-platform, multi-language environment. I can see also that some of the text editing/formatting functions would probably work better than what I currently use Excel for. I can see the attraction of an uncluttered dashboard/interface too. And extensibility. But as a beginner I can't yet relate to this 'context-switching' problem and the appeal of running all sorts of applications inside a text editor.
The mouse is better for some things (especially relative/spatial stuff), and the keyboard for others, but interfaces that make you switch back and forth are clearly problematic. Rather than popping up dialog boxes and alerts, Emacs displays results (such as compiler output) in another buffer. If it needs immediate input, it uses the minibuffer, a one-line buffer at the bottom of the screen.
In either case, its full text-editing functionality is available. You can run a directory browser/editor, a web browser, shell, interpreter, e-mail client, irc client, etc., and it's just another text window.
FWIW, Marco Baringer's SLIME screencast ( http://common-lisp.net/project/movies/movies/slime.mov ) is a pretty good example of proficient Emacs usage. That convinced me to try Emacs after using vi for several years.