Emacs

I'm a big Emacs user. I use it for coding, CVS access, engraving sheet music using Lilypond, and especially for reading my news and e-mail using Gnus.

I use Gnus because I like it better than any webmail interface, and generally better than programs like Eudora, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes, or Outlook. It has a lot of features I like:

• Unified interface between news and e-mail
• Scoring – it pays attention to what I read, what I say I read, and what I pass over, and in the future uses these trends to score incoming news/mail. Articles with a low score are automatically marked as read, and it will skip over them by default. Of course, I can choose to read them anyway.
• Adaptive spam filtering – it learns to filter spam based on what I mark as spam.
• A decent address book

(View my .gnus.el file, last updated here Feb. 28, 2007.)

Lilypond is a high-quality music typesetting program, akin to LaTeX for music. I use it because, while it is a pain, it produces better output than any other program I've seen in nearly every regard. Furthermore, it doesn't let you make stupid mistakes unless you mean to, unlike programs like Finale.

Oh, a couple more things I've used Emacs for: conversing on AIM and IRC; editing ASCII tables, compiling code and jumping to errors... (there's more, I just can't think of them).

I'm happy to answer questions about anything related to Gnus, Lilypond, and Emacs in general.