Seeing that I learned the basics in SimpleText on OS8, I definitely don't need my editor to code for me :^) Here are my needs, but of course I'm forgetting some:
Syntax highlighting
Most editors have this. I need it to highlight CSS in the head of a document, HTML in a PHP file, JavaScript in HTML, etc. Not so much for inline style="" or onclick="" attributes but when separated explicitly with style and script tags.
Indentation
Good, automatic, context-sensitive indentation
Code completion
Index my functions, classes, even variables so I don't have to repeat so much typing. Library function completion is nice too...
Project management
I need to be able to access my filesystem to some degree from the editor. It's very nice to be able to see a list of files in a project too, and to be able to launch projects by name. Finally, in TextMate I use Control+T which has a great project file quicksearch, so "Ctrl+T: head" will bring up a list of all files with these letters, regardless of their directory.
Access to shell, maybe a debugger
Access to the shell would be great, and I'm sure Emacs does this. I honestly don't know what a debugger is, and I always manually debug my code. Being able to run scripts while in Emacs would be great. Dropping to a shell and using "python ./some_script.py" works, but not as elegantly.

I know Emacs has plugins to do snippets like TextMate, so that's not a concern. And I'm willing to learn rudimentary ELisp to maximize customization.

In reply to Re^2: Getting into Emacs? by tmallen
in thread Getting into Emacs? by tmallen

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