"Emacs is a class of text editors that have an extensive set of features and that are popular with computer programmers and other technically proficient computer users. GNU Emacs, a part of the GNU project, is under active development and is the most popular version.

Emacs 22.1 hit the street a month ago, a long-awaited update to the GNU project's customizable and extensible do-everything super-editor that has been six years in the making. Here's a look at what you'll find in the new version.

"...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..."

This directory tree holds version 23.0.60 of GNU Emacs, the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. See also emacs-tiny-tools.git: http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=emacs-tiny-tools.git;a=tree;h=a78de25444...

Emacs is a feature-rich, powerful, and highly extensible traditional text editor that is popular among hardcore programmers and veteran UNIX/Linux users.

"Many programs have start-up settings, which they read from a configuration file or from some database. Emacs is no exception: when it starts, it reads a file called ".emacs" from your home directory. However, the big difference is that .emacs does not consists of simple "key=value"-pairs. Instead, your .emacs is an Emacs-Lisp (elisp) program itself.

"...you can run Elisp (the Lisp interpreter Emacs is built on) programs from outside Emacs [...] This will make Emacs work like Perl or Python or Ruby or Bash—an interpreter that reads the rest of the program and executes the code..." -- nota bene: I love Emacs as a text editor!

"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..."

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