Yeah emacs is a very useful tool as part of your data science workflow.
So is IPython notebook.
So is vim along with tmux, a good tiling window manager, and shell-tools.
However none of them are without flaws. None of them are free from requiring you to peek under the hood, and start a path towards becoming a hacker of your own tools, be it vim-scripting using python, or emacs scripting using elisp or guile. And once you have a turing-complete language under your tools, everything a programming language can do your tool can. But if there's a missing feature set requiring non trivial amount of code and no one on the internet has developed that code, you have to either take a long detour from your main project to develop that feature, or keep working the hard way, without that feature.
And most importantly, none of them should get you under the impression that yours is the final tool you'll ever need and it'll solve all your problems!
So is IPython notebook.
So is vim along with tmux, a good tiling window manager, and shell-tools.
However none of them are without flaws. None of them are free from requiring you to peek under the hood, and start a path towards becoming a hacker of your own tools, be it vim-scripting using python, or emacs scripting using elisp or guile. And once you have a turing-complete language under your tools, everything a programming language can do your tool can. But if there's a missing feature set requiring non trivial amount of code and no one on the internet has developed that code, you have to either take a long detour from your main project to develop that feature, or keep working the hard way, without that feature.
And most importantly, none of them should get you under the impression that yours is the final tool you'll ever need and it'll solve all your problems!