You adapt Emacs to your workflow, just like you adapt Lisp to your problem domain.
Except for the part where you're stuck trying to decipher existing Emacs Lisp. With Python I find I can express what I'm trying to do without too much thought.
ST2's plugin interface may be nice and sufficient for most "normal" tasks, but there plenty of things you simply cannot do.
Genuinely curious, but I think you can do a lot more with Emacs' APIs, and modify core parts of the editor since most of it is written in ELisp and you can easily swap out functions.
I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x tetris)...
I've looked at Sublime, its a beautiful editor though. It seems to have some good tricks up its sleave as well
You didn't always know python.
You learned it.
I own and use Sublime Text 2 -- and I do enjoy it. I also use and enjoy emacs.
Sublime Text 2 is far prettier...
"do I file an issue with the emacs developers hoping it is voted on enough to make into the next version? Hell no! This is emacs. I fix it myself!"
If you want to try it, just brew install emacs --cocoa and clone the repo to ~/.emacs.d
A coworker and I trade snippets of elisp for our configurations over email, and whenever I update the repo on one machine, the other needs to pull it down and evaluate the file (eval-buffer)
I have not found sharing customizations of emacs to be very difficult, but I also don't use any god packages like emacs starter-kit, or prelude (which I haven't heard of). I have let my configuration grow organically.
The reason Emacs users have their own unique setups is because they tailor the environment to their specific uses and preferences. That's going to be different for everybody.
Posting the entire configuration would add a lot of code that most people just wouldn't be interested in. It's easier to call out the interesting parts.
