> Also seconding. Vanilla emacs is already extremely powerful, and if you're doing real work, you'll end up having to use hosts that don't have all of your wonderful enhancements installed. It's good to know vanilla emacs.
I wonder if I'm weird, but I use a highly customized Emacs on my dev machine, but if I have to ssh into a host and edit something I just use vi there. The correct answer to vi or emacs has always been "both" for me.
I'm the same way, and I don't see why that would be so controversial. Vi(m) clearly has the better defaults, but Emacs is the better platform. (Then again, I'm the person who occasionally also uses ed just to keep it fresh in my memory, so there's that.)
They're just optimised for different jobs. Vim for line-based editing, emacs for nested. It just so happens that editing config files on remote hosts tends to be line-based, while editing code locally involves editing nested structures. I'll happily use both on the same machine though.
I wonder if I'm weird, but I use a highly customized Emacs on my dev machine, but if I have to ssh into a host and edit something I just use vi there. The correct answer to vi or emacs has always been "both" for me.