One of the things I like about Emacs's buffer workflow is that Emacs doesn't lie to you. In other, more modern editors you "open a file" on disk, make changes and then "save the file". Emacs distinguishes between a file and a buffer which may hold and image of a file in memory. "Visiting" a file consists of copying its contents into a buffer, which is the actual thing being edited; saving a buffer consists of writing its contents back to a file.