IDE that uses an external editor?

[robert]

skip at pobox.com wrote:
> One thing that's kept me from even looking at IDEs is that to the best of my
> knowledge none of them will integrate properly with external editors like
> Emacs or vi.  I know lots of tools support "Emacs-like keybindings", but
> believe me, I've never found one that does a decent job of that.  There is
> just so much more to powerful editors like Emacs or vi than a handful of
> cursor movement commands.  Once a person is proficient they generally won't
> accept substitutes.
> 
> So, please prove me wrong.  Are there any IDEs that will actually work with
> an external instance of Emacs (either by firing it up or by using a remote
> connection program like gnuclient)?

I don't use an IDE when coding on *nix, but I use decent Pythonwin on 
Windows (never found one of these other monster IDEs fluent/better enough)

It detects immediately when a file on disk changed and asks to reload 
form file or not - any good code editor should do this. The sc1-based 
editors ones do this usually. Thus one can without worries edit in 
different editors simultaneously.

Also in Pythonwins py-code or .ini settings it would be very easy to 
implement a 1-liner for a key stroke which opens the current file in an 
external editor. So that should do it.
The same practice should be possible easly with almost any *nix IDE 
which is written open source in python or lisp ... or has other easy 
script customization capabs.
(But I think there are no decent python IDE's on *nix :-( )

-robert