There actually is a text editor in there somewhere at least if you believe some of the MIT neckbeards. But you have to sort of tease it out with the proper meta key what-have-yous

You can however use a facsimile of Vim called Evil.

i once had a fax machine running on emac

You can install vi into emacs, and vi is the best text editor.

You can always open eshell and run ed(1), as it is the standard editor. ;-)