"If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you [...] You see, Emacs isn't a text editor. Emacs is a programming language that you can use to write your own text editor..."

"For those of you that write, or wish you wrote, or otherwise procrastinate while performing text-based activities, try out write-or-die [...] However, I use emacs; and switching from my carefully-tuned text-editor extraordinaire to a javascript-based text-box is a bit of a disappointment.

"...Emacs is an extensible, customizable, full-screen text editor. You can learn enough to be productive in Emacs in 30 minutes, but there is enough to learn about Emacs to keep you busy for years. The goal of this tutorial is to show you enough so that you are comfortable using Emacs as a work environment, not just as a text editor..."

Emacs is not so much a text editor, more a way of life - an "extensible, customizable self-documenting real time display editor" with thousands of ready made extensions that take you way beyond its original remit as a text editor

"Now that I am becoming a "real" programmer, I have made the decision to learn how to use the behemoth of a text editor, Emacs. A feature-rich and highly customizable editor, Emacs is distributed by the GNU project and has historically been one of the most popular text editors in programming history, along with vi [...] Learning Emacs is like learning how to drive stick.

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. In addition to a large number of bugfixes, 23.2 includes several new packages, such as the CEDET suite of development tools and a new mode for editing Javascript.

The focus of this 10 page mini-course is to provide a foundation for using basic text editors. At some time everyone who uses Linux will need a text editor. One of the most important reasons for learning vi is that it is loaded on every Linux distro by default whereas others like nano or emacs are not. So whatever text editor you choose be sure you load it and use it before you need it.

"...Emacs is a text editor. And it’s a lot more — sometimes too much. I know of a number of Emacs users who practically live in the editor. As I pointed out in a previous post, some users go a little overboard with the way in which they use Emacs — as a personal information manager, as a mail client, and even as a Web browser.

"Back in the day, when I was new to [GNU/Linux], joe was the first text editor that I managed to quit without having to reboot my machine. That I am still using it today, many years later, goes to show just how simple yet powerful joe is.