ST2's plugin interface may be nice and sufficient for most "normal" tasks, but there plenty of things you simply cannot do.

A mail client inside your editor?

The ability to make HTTP-requests, parse their results, and format the results inside your existing editor window?

Emacs is an abstraction layer for a non-preemptively threaded virtual machine, one application of which involves editing text, sound, video, images, etc.

Genuinely curious, but I think you can do a lot more with Emacs' APIs, and modify core parts of the editor since most of it is written in ELisp and you can easily swap out functions.

I love Sublime Text, but I would argue that Emacs is more extensible in all sorts of places where it really matters.

See e.g. tramp, org-mode, the vc-modes, gnus, magit, smart indenting etc.

martinced: you have been hell-banned for some, to me, completely opaque reason.

I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x tetris)...

I've looked at Sublime, its a beautiful editor though. It seems to have some good tricks up its sleave as well

I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well.

Emacs? I use a nice GUI build from http://emacsformacosx.com/. It runs great in both the GUI and shell.

    emacs -nw

I tend to uninstall vi and install ed on my machines, it is just enough and about 90% smaller! :)

You didn't always know python.

You learned it.

I own and use Sublime Text 2 -- and I do enjoy it. I also use and enjoy emacs.

Sublime Text 2 is far prettier...

But at the same time, I can't actually use the thing. No cursor motion keys available from the home row, seriously? Opening a file brings me up a GUI dialog with minimal (and, relative to the editor, inconsistent) keyboard navigability? The waste of space is awful: six columns wasted on the right side of the screen just to tell me line numbers that emacs just puts in the modeline.

It seems like the kind of editor someone from an IDE would want to use, and which would expose them to "serious programmer's editor" features. It's not going to pull away any emacs or vim users any time soon.

This is indeed what happens and I think it's a good thing : it brings the notion of efficient text editing to the masses.

Recently in my town one of my coworker did a friendly Sublime vs. Vim battle : a Sublime user and him were sitting side by side with their laptop display on the wall and taking turn to show off their favourite editor's features. The audience was mostly web developers (no old Unix neckbeard around) and I could hear at the beginning of the session some condescending remarks toward the "archaic" Vim, which was obviously going to get smashed by the "modern" Sublime. Of course it didn't quite turn out like that and at the end everyone seem to think that while Sublime was more sexy and approachable, Vim was a valid choice as well.

One of my coworker who was using exclusively Eclipse recently started to use Vim after trying Sublime. Sublime had opened his mind to efficient text editing and he started using Vim more often because it's free, ubiquitous and easy to use remotely.

I know several long-time Eclipse users who got seduced by Sublime. They had no idea it was possible to edit text so efficiently. Of course Vim or Emacs can achieve the same level of efficiency and beyond, but Sublime makes it more discoverable. Sublime is good for the reputation of text editors as opposed to IDEs, therefore it's good for Vim and Emacs.