Though it looks and acts like that, and can be used in such a way with no problem, in a sense, you've got it inside out.

From the GNU Emacs homepage:

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

It's not an editor with a lispy config language, it's a Lispy interpreter that comes with an editor that can configure it via said Lisp.

It's kinda like one of those Smalltalk VMs where the line is blurred between the code you're writing and the environment that it runs in.

Well the famous joke is "Emacs is an OS that lacks a decent text editor." (Yes Evil mode exists)

Emacs can do basically anything you write an extension for it to do. It can be your calendar, your email client, your rss reader or even your git gui on top of being an editor. Emacs can do so much that it's daunting to start using.

> Emacs can do basically anything you write an extension for it to do. It can be your calendar, your email client, your rss reader or even your git gui on top of being an editor. Emacs can do so much that it's daunting to start using.

Vim can do all of those things.

> Vim can do all of those things.

You can build a graphics editor in the browser, but it probably will never reach the level of Photoshop. Emacs can emulate Vim to a fairly good extent. However, I don't think Vim can ever surpass Emacs in terms of power and extensibility. It's simply the way Emacs is built. I love Vim, and I am a die-hard Vimmer. But I have to admit there are things that work in Emacs in a way that no other editor, whether it's Vim, VSCode, or anything else, does better.

The interactivity is one. It's easy to evaluate expressions from within the editor. I am not sure you can programmatically change aspects of nvim on the fly, and even if so, probably not a central component of nvim experience. M-x in Emacs is much more powerful than : in (n)vim.