Do you know anything about emacs? There is actually not that much bloat.

There is code to support each platform and windowing system emacs runs on. There is support for managing buffers, and other very primitive editor functionality like that. Then there is the Lisp VM and associated data structures ("Lisp_Object") to glue everything together. On top of that are some primitive functions ("and", "cdr", etc.), along with some primitive editing functions ("next-line") implemented in C. That's about it; the rest is all Emacs Lisp code that you can simply choose not to run. (Yes, some gets compiled right into the Emacs binary to speed startup, but you can skip that.)

Sure, you can argue that many emacs extensions (hello, Gnus) are bloat. But you can just pretend it doesn't exist; nobody is forcing you to use anything. Plain emacs is a very simple toolkit for building your own editor. Emacs with simple.el (and friends) is still a very simple, but rich, text editor. As you add packages, you add functionality and complexity... but you can choose what to add, Emacs is infinitely malleable and does not care what you do to it.

I am not too familiar with Eclipse, but I doubt that it is simpler than Emacs.

There's a difference between editing text files and editing text. In the former, all you need is some mechanism to type, delete, and move text. In the latter, you want to work with the contents itself in a huge number of ways.

There's no such things as an editor that works the way you like unless you only have very basic text editing needs. This is where people generally resort to Notepad or Word.

In the other case you really want a good editor that fits both your fingers and thinking, and that's where you had better write the editor yourself. It is at this stage when many people have figured out that starting with Emacs is the easiest path.

How is emacs bloated? Size of emacs 22.1 (windows): 36MB Size of eclipse galileo (windows) 189MB

Emacs runs in 4M resident on this box... Eclipse is closer to 500M. That is bloat.

Eclipse sometimes can't keep up with my typing. That's amazing, but not in a good way.

No comparison. Eclipse is a great integrated development environment: a relatively static (though extensible) application for writing applications.

Emacs is a lifestyle. Embrace it.

Eclipse is a great window environment. It only needs a good IDE.

People said similar things about Emacs (a great OS needing a decent text editor). Such statements mostly underestimate the tools in question unless this is just an intended reference to the Emacs quote.