Emacs is my editor of choice, very powerful and portable. Its complexity can be frustrating sometimes, a bit of a time-sink.

Altough I'm currently using a Mac, I try to resist the temptation to use Textmate. It may be easier to use and extend, but it is not Free Software.

I wonder if in the next releases Emacs can be made more friendly to users who keep forgetting about how its internals work and the elisp syntax :-)

For short Python scripts, I use Emacs; for bigger projects, I fire up Eclipse + PyDev.