...I think you're forgetting something about Emacs: It's not just an environment (I for one don't browse my mail in Emacs: I can't get the emacs mail clients to work), it's also a text editor with unbeatable extensibility. To this day, there is not a text editor I know of that is both as extensible, and has had that feature utilized as throughly. In many editors, extensibility is actually an afterthought (cough cough vim cough cough). There is integration with almost every language and tool that exists, and a few that don't anymore.
That is what makes it an amazing programming environment.
I use a pretty vanilla Emacs. The only customizations I do are:
- removing clutter (zapping toolbars, splash screens and the ilk)
- making very small tweaks to keyboard bindings so that it works more like Epsilon
I don't think that any of the Emacs improvements made over the last decade or more have done anything to my quality of life in Emacs. Rather, each release is more "what do I have to turn off this time?"
Fortunately, getting to bare-bones Emacs is not hard; with commercial editors it's often much harder to undo the damage of gratuitous "marketing checkbox" features. [I'm looking at you, Visual Studio 2013...]
every release there is more and more 'sexiness' that breaks useful functionality. i can't even comprehend what someone did to gud.
it used to be that you opened up a tgz and it would nicely display a dired mode of the contents. not for a long time.
and c indenting used to just work- now it seems to be confused by looking for patterns that exist by convention, not as any part of the language specification...so indenting just doesn't work a lot of the time
and for some reason someone with truly awful taste gets to choose the color schemes for highlighting (font-lock). i used to be able to just turn it off...but that becomes increasingly difficult
for a 30 years emacs user, it just keeps getting worse all the time
Font-lock is pretty easy to turn off. But then, the first thing I did when I installed Emacs was change the colorscheme to solarized dark, something I would reccomend to anybody.
As for the rest... I have no idea. There are a variety of C indent styles, and most are fairly standard (K&R, GNU, Linux, etc.), so I'm puzzled as to why it doesn't work, especially considering that CC mode has to also support C++ and Java, and so can't get too specific. If it really does suck that badly though, I'd hunt around for an alternate package.
Why would you use a vanilla emacs? Paredit, js2, magit, there are so many excellent extensions that can improve your workflow. If you're using lisp/scheme, SLIME/Geiser is indispensible.
I mostly work in C-like languages (and Python). Vanilla Emacs is just about all I need. I don't treat it as many people seem to use it, namely "enter Emacs once, then use it as an environment for hours."
Also, I learned Emacs in 1979, and it's pretty much wired into my muscle memory. Getting things back to an I-don't-have-to-think-about-it state is important, and whiz-bang features just get in the way most of the time.
That is what makes it an amazing programming environment.