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Emacs is more of a Lisp interpreter with a text editor front-end interface. That said, being able to work with images can be useful. For example, while documenting the workflow of a GUI application it can be useful to open some screenshots and highlight relevant sections.

While it is true that dedicated applications are usually more capable and convenient for specialised tasks, having tools integrated together like in Emacs also has its strengths (e.g. it can allow for heavy scripting of a workflow).

I mostly agree. But:

- image cropping in an image viewer is useful if you'd like to quickly crop screenshots before posting,

- you can already view images in emacs.

So the irksome bloat is likely already there, and stems from emacs not only being a text editor, but an operating system onto itself.

It's an IDE not a text editor.

It's an operating system not an IDE.

In that case, VS Code is also an operating system

I think Emacs goes a little further than VS Code, I don't think it has an X11 window manager, for example.

No, but VS Code has its own "window manager" that programs (extensions) can use