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I’m elated!!
I finally, finally, finally got my friend’s awesome Emacs lisp (list processing) onto my thinkpad at home. This lisp is great for working in xhtml. It has built in all sorts of helpful keybindings for marking up text. For e.g., I can close a tag by hitting three keys. No thinking about typing. I can press three buttons and place paragraph tags around a block of text, or form an unordered list with list items. Very awesome and time saving. My version of Emacs at home was very simple but now that I have added this I’m very happy.
Deterrents to doing so included my inability to read for an extended period of time 
But there were not too many steps, mainly a lot of reading involved. Ended up defining a Vista environment variable called “HOME”. Then my .emacs file containing the lisp and all the key bindings had to be stored in the “HOME” directory and named “.emacs.el”. And lastly, after all this work I was getting error messages at start up. So I had to start up emacs from the dreaded command line using a special prompt for debugging…
While I was without this built up version of emacs, I had begin to use notepad++. I was impressed by notepad++’s gui. It is easy to customize your background and foreground colors and you can customize syntax color and appearance for working in xhtml, css, javascript, etc. In contrast with Emacs, notepad++ does not have the cool shortcuts/keybindings that my emacs lisp has. And upon googling i did not see anything to make me believe it is possible to do this.
Also, instead of a keyboard shortcut for closing tags, it closes xhtml/css tags immediately as you write them. That is very helpful for writing new code but less helpful for editing code. Another cool feature of notepad++ that I wish i could figure out for Emacs is tab completion. Upon entering a css property or value it provides a drop down and hitting tab chooses the highlighted word. Emacs allows for “dynamic expansion” by pressing alt-/. I think this searches for possible completions based on other documents you have open. No built in library of possible terms though, or at least not that i’ve come across.
I think textmate’s completion takes it a step further and has the values built in, similar to firebug. Tab really does complete.
I’ll probably use a combination of the two going forth. Now to look into foreground/background color for Emacs.
