Among the major challengers to emacs is the immersive IDE:
Tim Bray:
>The feature that tempted me away from Emacs is the Navigator; you just hover over this little
button and this thing pops up... a really nice way to navigate around a big honkinÂ’ C file.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/03/11/NB6-1-C
However, if you've hung out in #emacs on freenode, or looked at www.emacswiki.org, you
probably guess that emacs will continue to improve things like the Emacs Code Browser to stay
competitive.
Now and then, working without an X session seems a release...