You might want to have a look. Emacs went through a bit of a doldrums in the early 2000s as it took six years to bring out version 21 *. But now it seems back on track, and if you used to be a fan, but haven't used it since version 20 I think you may be pleasantly surprised with version 22.
* Native windowing system integration was pretty tough, but I think the big problem was Unicode. Emacs was a victim of being a first mover here: in the 1990s it had adopted its own system (MULE) for integration of multilingual character sets, so when Unicode turned out to be the standard way to achieve this, MULE had to be backed out while the rather complex interface remained backwards compatible to avoid breaking a vast installed codebase.
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* Native windowing system integration was pretty tough, but I think the big problem was Unicode. Emacs was a victim of being a first mover here: in the 1990s it had adopted its own system (MULE) for integration of multilingual character sets, so when Unicode turned out to be the standard way to achieve this, MULE had to be backed out while the rather complex interface remained backwards compatible to avoid breaking a vast installed codebase.