Totally agree, emacs is first and foremost a lisp environment. Scratch is a default buffer!! It happens to have some great functionalities for editing. That's the purpose it evolved from.
Vi is lightweight, based on ed. By comparison emacs was huge. But emacs was a lisp programming environment with an editor that happened to be written in itself.
Computers were much smaller then. A swap drive was actually necessary and changing from one application to another often caused swapping.
Vi was fast and small. But it is still just an editor. It's a misleading comparison, much like VScode vs emacs now. Emacs is svelte these days.
I think #Emacs follows the Unix philosophy Just fine. It's a system of composable parts, We keep adding more parts that we can use for our compositions, just like Unix. And many of the things we add are actually from the Unix environment. We just plug in and use them. There's nothing more Unixy than that.
It's a programming language and an environment and runtime for that language. It just happens to have nice parts to make an editor from.
Really, it's just turtles all the way down.
Emacs was bloated in 1980 when we mistakenly compared it to vi, a tiny editor, thinking that emacs was an editor.
Zenie stoïc daoiste, développeuse du logiciels ouvertes, Unix, emacs depuis des décennies. Musicienne, shokuhachi et autres flûtes, artiste.Sculpturess, écrivaine, dessin, imprimante 3D, créatrice des choses, flutes harmoniques. gaming. 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈☮️☯️💟