See the FAQ and this guide for details. This directory also contains scripts that you may find useful. Feel free to copy them to your home directory as long as you know what you're doing. Whether you choose to use Xemacs or GNU Emacs is largely a matter of taste. Xemacs has two mail readers, a built in web browser, support for cvs, make and a boatload of other bells and whistles.
Some people like it.
Some people like okra. You may also wish to try kwrite. It runs only under X, and supports syntax highlighting. It's part of KDE, but you don't have to run the full KDE environment to use it. The above are all text editors.