Advice on best environment for Ada on Windows

[Rick Newbie <nuttin@nuttn.nowhere>]

I'm new to Ada and slowly getting into my first small programs. The 
question that arises soon after the first steps is that of the best 
working environment, so I wanted to hear what the regular Ada users work 
with.

So far I have identified three possible scenarios:

1) GPS only. While GPS looks good it becomes rather fickle when you 
start working with it. The underlying Python stuff seems to be a 
constant source of trouble, some scripts that come with GPS are flat out 
buggy etc. While it is good to work with the project hierarchy and 
getting online help, the editor is simply not up to the job, not to 
mention the shaky interaction with external programs most notably gdb.

2) GPS with an external text editor. I installed Emacs and am working 
through their tutorial as well. I have been a Visual Studio user for 
many years and thus I am spoiled but back in the 90s, I was working on 
some Wordstar compatible editor, can't remember the name, and with 
Watcom C compiler which was all pretty basic so I'm no stranger to a 
retro looking command line environment. I know Emacs has an Ada module 
which I haven't installed yet but I assume it will be working fine since 
I read a lot about it.

3) Then there is Slickedit. That one looks great and even has a built in 
Ada browser. The problem is it is basically impossible to compile a 
gprbuild script from within Slickedit, at least I couldn't get it going 
and from my conversation on their forum it seems they don't get it 
working either. Slickedit also has problems with reference building 
often times it does not recognize identifiers that it should have 
tagged, but hasn't. Also the "Gnat Ada project" option does not 
recognize the Ada include directory, you have to create a new "other" 
project and then set up everything Ada related by hand.

At the moment I tend to solution 2, although I have to learn the use of 
Emacs on top of it all, but that seems to be rather simple with some 
cheat sheet, unless installing the Ada module requires fiddling with 
Lisp scripts since I know absolutely nothing about Lisp.

So what does everyone else use? What is the best solution here?

Thanks