There’s a joke that emacs isn’t as much an editor as an operating system. The more I use it the more I prefer it to every other operating system I’ve used in a long time.

I prefer to think of it as a user interface (there’s some operating system down below handling network and disk access). A sobering observation is that on some days the emacs process has more children than my X session has (emacsclient runs a single process in the X session and the server is running independently of the session). If current firefox didn’t have process isolation this would most certainly be the case.

I used to think of emacs as a development environment (I don’t know much about Eclipse but I get the feeling that eclipse works the same way, permitting extensions and plugins to handle new functionality, which you would naturally program in and for eclipse.) I remember reading Steve Yegge’s comments on Emacs at Amazon’s customer service department.

The other way to rationalize this is that emacs is a lisp interpreter, emacs lisp bytecode interpreter, and a bytecode compiler, so it’s also a bit like the JDK and JVM. It’s a platform you use to build applications, and you can run your applications there.