While not a literal "pipe", the $EDITOR and $VISUAL shell conventions are pretty much the same concept applied to larger programs. And of course, which I think

While not a literal "pipe", the $EDITOR and $VISUAL shell conventions are pretty much the same concept applied to larger programs. And of course, which I think you were saying with your comment on extensibility, vim and emacs are well-designed for sending content out to a shell for processing (spell-check is a common example) and retrieving the results. ("!!" in vim)