[tjradcliffe]

I'm an mg guy who uses Emacs when he has to. Unlike Emacs, mg is an editor. I don't know what tool-class Emacs properly falls into, but as many people here have pointed out, it's closer to a general-purpose scriptable environment than an editor. Editing is a side-effect of the other capabilities, very nearly. I know at least one person who uses Emacs as their shell.

For those of us who just want a clean, fast, light-weight editor, mg is great. It's what Emacs would have been had it been an editor, instead of something else.

[reality_czech]

"I just want an editor" is the vi philosophy, and has been since olden times. Emacs users tend to write a lot of emacs modes and lisp macros, whereas vi users generally use external programs or the shell.

The thing is, vi is much better at being "just an editor" than emacs is. The key bindings for vi are highly ergonomic and let you keep your fingers on the home row almost all the time. With emacs, you're playing "twister" with your fingers, often pressing 3 or 4 keys simultaneously just do to some simple task like quitting or indenting a paragaph. vi also supports things like deleting to the end of the line, going to the end of the file, or even appending to the end of a line with a single keypress.

If you're using something with emacs key bindings but no emacs-like extensibility, you're really getting the worst of both worlds. You really should just be using vi. And you will find a lot of people with your philsophy who use it, and it is installed on nearly every system out there.