RE: Text-Mode for a beginner

[Drew Adams]

> > type an entire paragraph without having to put a newline
> > at the end of every line.

M-x longlines-mode

,----
| longlines-mode is an interactive autoloaded Lisp function in `longlines'.
| (longlines-mode &optional ARG)
| 
| Toggle Long Lines mode.
| In Long Lines mode, long lines are wrapped if they extend beyond
| `fill-column'.  The soft newlines used for line wrapping will not
| show up when the text is yanked or saved to disk.
| 
| If the variable `longlines-auto-wrap' is non-nil, lines are automatically
| wrapped whenever the buffer is changed.  You can always call
| `fill-paragraph' to fill individual paragraphs.
| 
| If the variable `longlines-show-hard-newlines' is non-nil, hard newlines
| are indicated with a symbol.
`----

> Do you understand that WYSIWYG and GNU Emacs are diametrically
> different concepts?

No.

GNU Emacs contains the universe, including WYSIWYG.