You aren't teaching them to use a text editor. You are teaching them to use emacs. A choice based on your personal preference that wastes lots of their time learning what is a very complicated environment. You need to write lisp just to make emacs auto indent on return.

Nano or gedit in comparison would be sensible choices if you were interested in teaching students about the language rather than indoctrination in the editor wars.

Unless of course it's a lisp class in which case Emacs is a sensible choice, but i think you would have mentioned that if it were the case.

> You need to write lisp just to make emacs auto indent on return.

I wanted to say that it's not true, but fortunately I went and checked and found this (in my programming-mode hook):

    (local-set-key (kbd "<return>") 'newline-and-indent)

in my Emacs config. I thought that it's configurable via `customize-*` interface, which is as nice as any other editor "settings" dialog, but apparently it's not...

OTOH I'd rather write Lisp than JSON or Python for editor configuration, but you're right in that it's personal preference.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend making Emacs the required editor for any programming course (if not using Lisp). Just disallow using IDEs and let the students choose their editors. Make a list of mandatory features, like syntax highlighting, and let them use whatever they feel comfortable with. That way you can focus on teaching programming instead of teaching how to use an editor.