Vim is with respect, just an editor.

Emacs is often confused as being an editor, but it's not.

It certainly houses a few different editors, including Vim (as people will often point out eVil is Vim inside Emacs)

Emacs is basically a text centric computing platform, built with a flavor of Lisp.

At this point there's several thousand apps / packages.

It used to be a joke that Emacs is an Operating System that lacks a decent text editor. These days it has several.

The joke now should be that it lacks a decent logo and marketing department.

Or perhaps the joke should be that Vim users are terrified they're missing out on something they don't get so they use snark as a defense mechanism.

> “Emacs is basically a text centric computing platform, built with a flavor of Lisp.”

That’s actually the best explanation of Emacs I’ve heard. Thank you.

I always think of Emacs (never used it tho) as a Smalltalk system without images and with Lisp instead of Smalltalk as the underlying language.

Every visible and invisible think is inspectable and changable at runtime, yup - pretty cool and I loved it for programming! Not sure whether I want to get on the emacs train tho. I have problems mantaining efficiency either way already... And I favor tools that work without set-up. Then again I am still young enough that learning investments pay off by a huge margin... tough.

"Text-centric computing platform" is lovely. Why don't you send that to Nicolas Petton -- it would great on the website.

M-x package-install RET evil