Emacs is not a great text editor in and of itself—it’s a building material for the best text editor you can make for yourself.
I find this to be absolutely true as I stare at my 1700 line init.el that customizes Emacs to my needs. There is a way to do pretty much anything you could want with enough fiddling.
Read Why Emacs: Redux by Bozhidar Batsov.