Not the case in my reality. Emacs has always been That Way. And then CERN/Mosaic happened, and browsers (being all-singing, all-dancing environments that do ev

Not the case in my reality. Emacs has always been That Way. And then CERN/Mosaic happened, and browsers (being all-singing, all-dancing environments that do everything from page layout to hosting interpreters and databases, are also big apps) came along. This has not lead to awk becoming an MUA, or tmux adding a flight simulator, or tee offering to store things as PDFs. Nor has it stopped the development of building-block tools - I still see more nifty new things built with more or less the same assumptions than I can play with. The only thing I can think of is that you're referring to GUI apps, at least mostly on Linux. GUIs (or more specifically, what Alan Cooper termed 'sovereign applications', but they are mostly GUIs) are typically subject to Zawinski's Law in ways that command line tools are not. Heck, Mutt is somewhat subject to it, itself, for that reason.