Seriously, I took the time a couple of years ago to learn how to use gdb with Emacs and I've never looked back, it has made my life soooo much easier.

Bearing in mind, that this was when I was working on my B.Sc and we did lots of nasty stuff with pointers. However, when I think of how much the people who didn't know gdb struggled with finding bugs, I'm glad I learnt to use it.

I still use gdb on a regular basis. I've been meaning to learn to use the Perl debugger just as well, maybe it's time to try and track down an Emacs mode for it...

To set aside the holy war, I use Emacs for programming and vi for general editing of text files...