It's "editing macros," so yes, it's an editor first and foremost.
> not an IDE
It's integrated; mostly used by developers; it's an environment.
- Run Nethack
- Chat over IRC. Double combo with Bitlbee
- Chat over Slack/$whatever proto is designed in Elisp
- Write Interactive Fiction
- Emulate Interactive fiction with a Z machine in Elisp
- Write and read emails/news with GNUs
- Listen to music with EMMS
- M-x doctor because is too complex and you need to talk to someone
- Comment on HN with eww
- Do literate programming
- Do math, and with Maxima/R, algebra/statistics/whatever
- Use GIT with Magit
- org-mode. With this you could write three ebooks larger than the Java specs.
- org-babel. I forgot it. This is damn magic. Programming as if you were in a word processor, going back and forth, easily, showing up your results inline.
Also you missed that you can run WebKit inside of emacs. Also you embed X apps in emacs and use it as a window manager.
Not in the console mode, you can't.
Of course, I edit text in emacs with evil: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil