Hacker News Reader

This is not bloat, it's flexibility.

Emacs does not come with a lot of features built in, it comes with lots of loadable modules. If you don't need them then don't load them. The notion that Emacs is bloated has not really stood since around 1985.

The power to write a first person maze (which just blew my mind since it appears to be written as a character based hack, rather than an embedded widget) is the same power that allows you to write powerful libraries for modifying text.

It's still a great text editor, you don't have to install all the other bits and pieces.

Emacs is a Lisp interpreter. Expect even more interesting things to be built as performance is improved. I believe there is an effort under way to get Guile to process Elisp. Emacs could become the foundation for a lot more apps.