Just to establish why i'm such a noob, i'm a high school student who dabbles in C++ and Java on Windows. I currently use Dev-C++ and JCreator. Anyway, i digress

I've always heard about or read about Emacs being the best development tool in the universe, it's so great, it can do anything, etc.
So i finally downloaded it, and i don't get it. You can't compile code, manage projects, or anything that has to do with actually making your program. All you can do is write the code. And i really don't like it as a text editor. It's confusing and inconvenient.
Can someone paint me a picture showing why Emacs is so ludicrously popular.

ever tried writing c code and have some customizations for emacs? plus ever tried debugging a program with gdb from within emacs...

google for .emacs customizations and see how much u can customize this little tool so that u really enjoy writing code in it..

for instance i've customzed my emacs so that it shows me the closing parenthesis automatically and i wont miss closin braces..

plus ive colored my background a lovely dark olive green and my text in flourescent which really enhances readability. Keywords come up in a mytic blue color and so on..

U got to read more and read HOW people use it...

Ive attached my very simple emacs customization file. I have renamed it emacs.txt. download it..remove the '.txt' and rename it to .emacs (YES without any extension and with a '.' prepended). Then copy it to your HOME directory (if you dont have one then create a new environment variable called HOME and save the .emacs file at that location).

Hope you have fun and try open source software like linux too...maybe even freebsd..ull like it i hope

If you don't like emacs, try vim. I tested both and ended up preferring vim because it doesn't require funky key combinations to perform functions. Your fingers generally stay on the "home row".

Vim is a little difficult to figure out but the tutorial is only ~30 minutes long and teaches you most everything about it.

The big thing about emacs and vim is that they are very good text editors. They don't try to be an IDE, compiler, or anything thing else; they simply edit text. Because they have color coding options and customization features, you can use them for nearly any code project. With plug-ins, you can make them more than text editors but you don't really need to.