IDE that uses an external editor?

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

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)?

For Java, I know Netbeans uses an external protocol to talk to other
editors.  Both XEmacs and vim are possibilities.

Recently, other projects like agide have started using the netbeans
protocol.  My guess would be that something like agide is exactly what
you want: it's more of a "tie my editor, project builder, debugger, etc
together seamlessly" concept than a "you will use this editor, this
project builder, and this debugger" concept.  Sort of an unintegrated
but federated development environment.  It's all written in Python, but
it's still sort-of in its infancy.