If you want Emacs to browse lots of files, you may want to look into a feature I just discovered myself: speedbar. If you have Gnu Emacs 21.x, you can enter "M-x speedbar", and it will show a new frame with a list of files in the current directory (and you can expand subdirectories from there). Also, two more things that look interesting, but which I haven't yet tried out: the Emacs Code Browser and the Java Developement Environment for Emacs (JDEE). Really, the only things I liked using an IDE for were graphical GUI layout tools, and debugging. And, I bet I can use jdb more effectively from within Emacs than I'm doing now.
Emacs!
Re: Emacs!