"...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.

"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. [...]

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)..."

"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.

"...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..."

"...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!

A text editor is software used for editing plain text files. It has many different uses such as modifying system configuration files, writing programming language source code, jotting down thoughts, or even making a grocery list.

"I've been reading lots of blogs and opinions about emacs the last few days. What strikes me is all of these people who brag about how large their .emacs files have become. So let me make this very clear: If your .emacs file is longer than a page YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Why?