After a few years doing my PhD I’ve settled on Emacs as my main editor. This is mainly because it is incredibly powerful and extendable, there are thousands of free packages available to use and everything can be tweaked exactly the way I want.
The price to pay for this freedom is a fairly steep learning curve and the need to get familiar with Emacs Lisp (for customizing packages). However Emacs has been around since 1976 and is still under active development so it must have something going for it!
In this post I’ve described some of what I consider the most useful packages to get started with Emacs. For a guide on how to install Emacs packages in the latest version see this page.