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