"A common misconception when thinking of “Emacs as an OS” is to assume that Emacs special modes are re-inventing the wheel. They are not (for most of them), Emacs and its modes focus on the user interface side of things. The backends are almost always separate programs. This is precisely where the Unix philosophy still stands strong. Using Emacs as an interface for everything is merely equivalent to using GTK-only applications. (Only much better, obviously.) "