• Easy cutting and pasting between files, directory lists and the command line and the output of (cygwin) shells.
• Integrated with most version control systems.
• Keystrokes can be easily combined into macros. These macros can operate on cygwin shells such that macros can trigger shell commands and operate on their output. Examples:
  1. If a file contains a comma separated list of file names it is easy to define a macro such that a shell command runs on each of these files.
  2. It is also easy to define a macro performing a search combined with an edit in each of these files.
  3. Another emacs macro task is searching each of these files, copying some text from each of them and adding this to a third new file.
• Keyboard oriented editor increases productivity compared to mouse oriented editors.
• Flexibility: extendable with new commands and macros. Many addons available for example for editing and validating xml and for syntax highlighting languages such as php, java, C++, Visual Basic, etc.
• Facility for tag based indexing of files.
• Disadvantage: it takes time to learn the key combinations. However it takes only a couple of hours to learn the basics of emacs, such that it can be used as if it were the basic notepad editor.

For all these advantages emacs is used as a single replacement of many IDE's. See also the article of Derek Slager.