A series on teaching and configuring emacs, starting off with “What is emacs?”
Emacs is often referred to as a text editor although in reality it is much more than that. At its core Emacs is an integrated and programmable computing environment for running text oriented Emacs Lisp tools. These tools range from simple text editors, IDEs, IRC clients1, email clients2, life organizers3, terminal emulators4, version control interfaces5, RSS readers6 and anything else you can think of. If you are dedicated enough you can even run a web browser inside Emacs. Emacs can also display images although that is not its main purpose.