GNU Emacs is one of the first products of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and initiator of the GNU project. It is an extremely powerful, extendible and customizable editing system capable of virtually any task that involves inspecting and modification of files. It is in no way limited to "editing text files". It can manage complex software projects, support programming, seamlessy integrates with compilers and debuggers, and can do electronic mail and more, much more.