whats your opinion on XEmacs? I find it surprising that they went to the trouble of re-writing Emacs from scratch and still used Emacs Lisp. I think that XEmacs has provided a good rivalry for Emacs, both these editors have stolen ideas from eachother.
re-writing Emacs from scratch
It's a fork of GNU Emacs 19.
It was a good rival for GNU Emacs years ago, but now Emacs has all the things that where XEmacs-only.
Emacs 24 will have packages and there's the lexbind branch which aims to give lexical scoping to Emacs Lisp. Just use GNU Emacs.