Togan Muftuoglu
I am seriously considering Emacs as the alternative for all of the things you ask and for all the other stuff you didn't ask, they are all integrated and from buffer to buffer I can copy cut paste stuff. The learning process is slow but hey it is very rewarding with the sense of peace one and the software does what I mean
Welcome to the club, I took the plunge years ago, The learning curve is steep, but you won't regret it.
Gnus is good but I haven't yet fallen in love with it,
You will, once you get use to the way Gnus blurs the distinction between different sources: mail, Usenet, RSS and Atom feeds, etc.
and for imap usage (not offlineimap) I found it slow, or my tweaking is not good.
You should try "Ma Gnus" (the developmental version of Gnus). Lars put in a lot of work and now imap is super fast. You can get it by doing: #+BEGIN_SRC sh git clone http://git.gnus.org/gnus.git #+END_SRC
BitlBee is the option and it will be used in combination with either ERC or RCIRC
Yes, BitlBee with Erc will handle all your irc and IM needs with one interface.
Although there is diary and calendar in Emacs, I found Org-Mode as the best of all. My notes, agenda for the whole year are within it and hey they are plain text files and end allowing me to read them in any system
Other advantages of Org-mode (off the top of my head): 1. Being plain text one can automatically backed up into a git repo or any other version control system. 2. One can export org files to almost anything. 3. If you program, you can integrate almost any language with org-babel. 4. Very friendly and responsive community. Reported bugs are usually fixed within minutes and the community is very responsive to feature requests. 5. Smartphone integration via MobileOrg. 6. Superb outlining capabilities. 7. Can hyperlink to almost anything. 8. Easy capture of information both inside and outside Emacs with templates. 9. Very powerful and flexible search capabilities. 10. Dynamically generated contents via dblocks. 11. System integration and automation via Emacsclient. If you haven't yet, I suggest you join the Gnus and Org-mode users lists. Charles -- "Are [Linux users] lemmings collectively jumping off of the cliff of reliable, well-engineered commercial software?" (By Matt Welsh)