I’ve been a happy XEmacs user for well over a decade if not close to 15 years. Emacs in general has been a part of my computing life since 1985 when I learned Scheme on MIT’s Hewlett-Packard Chipmunks. When Lucid forked Emacs their X11 support felt so much better I switched from GNU.
However, this old code piker has been trying to get into the git distributed version control system. All the cool kids are doing it! Git is heavily command line driven, but if you live in Emacs you’d really like some integration. None of the git packages worked well for me and XEmacs.
At work, I decided to give GNU Emacs a test drive, since there seemed to be a plethora of git packages, all developed on GNU Emacs. The magit package turned out to work pretty well. Plus, for my personal MacBook, I was pleasantly surprised by David Caldwell’s nightly MacOS X Emacs builds. Worked well straight out of the box. GNU Emacs felt like a first class citizen of MacOS X, whereas the available graphical versions of XEmacs were never smooth for me.
The switch is not 100% set in stone, but I’m feeling like it might stick.
Oh I forgot to mention that Steve Yegge’s extended bloviation on XEmacs proved to be the tipper to at least revisit GNU Emacs.