Hi,
can't believe this thread slipped me for so long...
Well, after some 6 years in (X)emacs and with a configuration of some 4000 lines of elisp I must have configured my XEmacs (almost) exactly to my needs. What is it that makes this so powerfull for me?

• dabbrev (defaults to M-/): dynamic abbreviations which lets you pick the really long but insightful variable names because you don't have to type them anymore.
• M-x locate so you'll never do the locate in xterm and mark the filename with the mouse again (later pasting that filename into XEmacs anyway)
• speedbar one of the finest tools for navigation in large projects I've ever come across
• desktop for re-opening all the files on the next day
• active-menu.el (see the website) for one more line of code
• function-menu for another navigation mechanism which works only in the current buffer (a buffer is usually a representation of a file in the editor)
• saveplace to find myself at exactly the cursor position as the last time I opened that file
• cperl auto help shows a short syntactic information; good if it has been a while since your last perl programm
• and thousands of other things that don't spring to my mind in this moment

Have fun!

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion