As is well known, GNU Emacs is the one, true, catholic and apostolic text editor. Don't get me started on that Lucid/Xemacs apostasy -- that which is called emacs is not truly Emacs unless it passes through the fingers of RMS.
I am currently the maintainer of the GNU Emacs package for Red Hat, a popular distributor of the GNU/Linux operating system. If you are having problems with GNU Emacs on one of our products (such as Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux) then feel free to report a bug and we'll try to fix it.
Emacs version 22 is currently being developed by an international group of programmers coordinated by the Free Software Foundation. If you want to try the bleeding edge emacs, you can check it out from their CVS repository.
Periodically, version 22 pretest releases come out. I provide Fedora users with an Emacs 22 yum repository for Fedora Core 5 and 6. A Fedora system configured to use this repository will install the latest version 22 pretest in preference to the version 21.4 emacs that comes with Fedora Core. Fedora Core 7 ("Rawhide") will include Emacs version 22 by default.
There has been some interest in how I use Emacs with cscope (which defaults to the vi editor), so I am documenting it here. First, you need to set up emacsclient. Start Emacs under X and run the command "M-x server-mode" (a deprecated alternative is "M-x server-start"). Put it in your .emacs file if you like. From the command line, you can now type the command emacsclient --no-wait <filename>, and the Emacs you started should open the file and display it in a buffer.
Now lets make life easier by putting this in a shell script (a shell alias would work for what we've done so far, but not for cscope). So put the following in the file $HOME/bin/ec
#!/bin/bash
exec emacsclient --no-wait $@
Be sure to chmod 775 $HOME/bin/ec.
Now you can start cscope thus EDITOR=ec cscope -d -p3 and it will open files in the emacs that runs the server process. Note that the emacsclient command can be used as an external editor in almost any program that needs one (e.g. pine).
There is a bug in the script supplied by Adobe for starting their Adobe Acrobat (acroread) program on Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5, Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Core 7 (rawhide). This patch fixes it. Apply it with
# patch -d /usr/local/Adobe -p1 </path/to/acroread.patch