"...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.

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.

"This tutorial shows you how to obtain help from Emacs in various ways. After working through this tutorial, you'll know how to get descriptions of keystrokes, commands, functions, and read and browse through the many documentation resources that come with this world-famous open source 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..."

"As I explained in my previous Emacs tutorial on killing a block of text, it is sometimes hard to find easy to understand documentation on how to use emacs. One of the first things I wanted to learn how to do in Emacs was block editing..."

"EMACS(1) is a real-time display editor which can be extended by the user while it is running. Extensibility means that the user can add new editing commands or change old ones to fit his editing needs, while he is editing. EMACS is written in a modular fashion, composed of many separate and independent functions.

Take charge of your editing session within Emacs and use it to your advantage. This tutorial is the fourth in a series, and shows you three areas of Emacs that control some aspect of the editing session: various command-line options, the register, and bookmark facilities for setting and saving positions and data.

"...Here are two examples of what a modern Emacs might look like, one editing Python code (with ECB, Org mode agenda and integrated interpreter), one editing reST documentation (with occur-mode)..."

"...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!