A Guided Tour of Emacs

The GNU Emacs Manual calls Emacs the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display
editor, but this description tells beginners little about what Emacs is capable of. To give you an idea,
here is a sampling of the things you can do with Emacs:
Beyond just being able to edit plain text files, Emacs includes special features to help you write in
many different human languages and programming/markup languages:

(Click on any of these pictures for a larger view.)

…as well as tools for compiling, running, and testing programs. Emacs integrates with GDB to provide
an IDE (M-x gdb):
Emacs can compare two files and highlight their differences (M-x ediff):

Emacs is a file manager (M-x dired):

Emacs can read news, mail, and RSS feeds (M-x gnus):

You can even play tetris in Emacs (M-x tetris):

You might see now why some people consider Emacs to be not merely a text editor but almost a
complete operating system. Some users find that they can do almost all of their work from within
Emacs.