I learned emacs not too long ago, and I was amazed that the better principles were established so much earlier and abandoned for new tools. One thing about its philosophy I think makes it better is the consistency of everything being buffers, commands, and keystrokes. Eclipse has multiple kinds of buffers, views, panels, dialogs, and keys, menus, toolbars, docks, etc., that aren't interchangeable. It reminds me of the syntax philosophies of Lisp and Java - the tools follow the languages.
I use eclipse for Java still. Our project has something like 100,000 source files. Memorizing this lay-out is hard! There isn't much sense to it. Having the open-type shortcut is a life-saver. So is the type hierarchy browser.
Emacs is great for pretty much everything else though!
Here's something like what I do at work. Syntax not quite correct, I'm sure. It's a C++ project, but you can probably adapt it to your situation. Making the TAGS file takes a while every now and then, so you might want to run it as a cron job.
