Over at the Emacs subreddit, WorldsEndless has an interesting post that considers Emacs as a text editor. That is, how convenient is it to edit text with Emacs, putting any of its other virtues aside. He considers both the built-in capabilities and a few of the common packages that most of us use.
What’s surprising, given the constant griping about how “Emacs out-of-the-box is unusable,” is how far you can get with just the built-in functions. Most decent editors can probably do all the things he calls out—with the possible exception of the transpose functions—but Emacs really stands out when you start customizing with the third party packages. WorldsEndless mentions flyspell-correct; some of the ace-* functions; multiople-cursors; and consult-yank-pop, which is similar to one of my favorites, counsel-yank-pop.
I, of course, have my own list. I wrote about my favorites here and here. Doubtless all you Emacers have your own favorites. The takeaway is that Emacs provides really great facilities for wrangling text. The only other editor that I’ve used that comes close is Brief from back in the MSDOS days and I wouldn’t go back even if I could.
I think it’s a fair assertion that the built-in functionality of Vim provides more functionality than the built-in functionality of Emacs but once the you add in packages Emacs is far ahead. You may or may not agree but there’s no denying that Emacs provides great text handling functionality.