"Emacs-like ... to appease techies who are fed up with feature bloat"

If this is seriously Microsoft's reasoning, I can only say, "What an age we live in."

The mind wobbles, as another ditzy blonde was known to say.

...Microsoft could be planning their own release of .NET for Linux.

Emacs as a basis for an IDE made some sense until Eclipse appeared.

(Personally I'm allergic to IDEs - give me vi, sh and make) - but going for something as arcane as emacs with what's now a minority programming language as its implementation and extension language strikes me as wilfully weird. MS is either admitting it's missed the Eclipse boat, or someone's trying to go back to his good old days playing with 4.2BSD on a Vax at college.

Don't be silly. Visual studio had an emacs editing mode for years (called "epsilon" I think). They probably just want to update it.

I'd rather eat glass than use EMACS and I'm pretty sure most EMACS users feel much the same way about VS, so I can't see what would be gained from such a perverse move.

On the other hand, MS like bloat, and EMACS is certainly a porker among editors. So who knows ?

Only Microsoft could seriously entertain the idea of basing a new lightweight, less bloated editor on Emacs. It isn't for nothing that the name Emacs is often expanded to Emacs Makes A Computer Slow.

So, they're going to come up with something as good as XEmacs + csharp-mode + Makefile? Fat chance!

Agh, so much trollbait for emacs lovers like myself, someone even mentioned vi in an emacs story *wags finger*. I winced at the description of emacs as arcane, however true it may be. I hope that MS do use emacs, competition is always healthy provided they play fair. If they copy from us then we should be able to mimic their good ideas, should they have any.

I like eclipse and use it as my debugger all the while wishing emacs had a better one/I was more proficient at gdb.

Yes, it is oddly apposite that of all the open source editors out there, Microsoft should choose to go for the huge, hideous, bloated mess of feeping creaturitis and let's-throw-in-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink that is Emacs, but I guess it makes sense...

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... after the failure of Vista, they're probably looking for a new O/S!

Emacs gets a lot of its power from its portable customization capabilities and buffer management. It seems to me that the negative comments about Emacs are just trash talk.

IDEs, including Eclipse and VS, tend to slow editing tasks down but are okay for debugging and for visual layout tasks. Flexbuilder on the eclipse platform is nice for what it is.

VS doesn't need an Emacs-editing mode. Just use XKeyMacs. (Emacs-mode in Eclipse is a pale shadow...)

As for MS seeking out Emacs people, I haven't the foggiest!

They will hunt out the best programmers and invite them all to a swank booze-up.

Then get them drunk and expose them to some 'patented' MS software.

Of course they will be politely requested to sign an NDA, but will be to inibrated to realise it stops them doing any programming at all for the next 2 years.

It's rather odd to hear that Emacs is bloated, uses too much memory, and makes a computer slow. It's actually become hard to buy a new PC memory card smaller than one gigabyte, so what computers are the above people using? BBC micros? ZX 80s? I can use Emacs on fairly old PCs or over ssh connections without any problems.

On any standard PC made within the last ten years, Emacs is fast to start up, uses much less memory than a web browser, and it's a great editor for software development, doing such useful things as automatically indenting, spotting mistakes in code, and highlighting, as well as being able to compile, go to source lines causing error messages, search for variables across files, and debug.

Eclipse, on the other hand, takes about twenty times longer to get started than Emacs, uses far more memory, and it crashed the very first time I used it.

As for Microsoft, perhaps it's worth noting that Emacs currently doesn't come equipped with a Visual Basic editing mode.

I remember reading about a Emacs vs. Vi holy war that happened when I was still in my mother's womb. Apparently there were arguments abound saying that Emacs itself is already feature bloat.

Forget emacs, I code using GNU Nano, jGrasp and Notepad++ (unless I'm at work, which I have no choice as I need to cook up .NET stuff for the clients).

he he he, well it's as big as a Microsoft operating system.. oh good god what do those soulless drones want with gods IDE I hate to say it but I wish them well it's a terrible program they should love it.

We all know about flame wars in comments sections of stories, and what is likely to set them off:

iPhone stories will have Jobs fanbois and everyone else at each others' throats

MS stories will have the Tux geeks frothing at the mouth

Paris Hilton stories will have everybody frothing at the trou... oh, never mind

But to start a *REAL* flame war, you can't beat a story on emacs to whip the VI lusers into a real frenzy

Emacs' reputation for bloat is from much earlier days when everyone had less memory - hence Eight Meg And Constantly Swapping. It's actually reasonably lightweight by modern standards...

Personally, I suspect that it's part of Don Box's on-going effort to actually <b>become</b> Richard Stallman.

Or maybe their graphics design department decalred that they needed some iMacs on a crackly phone line? Not quite as funny as 'needing more Eunuc programmers', but still...