> now after using linux for 20 something years, the fact that it can do everything just seems so antithetical to the unix way...even if I could see myself using

> now after using linux for 20 something years, the fact that it can do everything just seems so antithetical to the unix way...even if I could see myself using it, the idea of being so dependent on one app for so much seems so weird to me these days. Guess I'll be sticking with vim and various cli tools until the end of time. I used to feel the same, after using Linux and Vim for 15 years. But then I switched to Emacs 6 years ago; initially as an experiment, but I couldn’t go back to Vim after trying Org-mode and other packages. Now my perspective has changed. Emacs at its core is not one program, in a sense. It is a Lisp interpreter with a GUI, that ships with thousands of ready-to-use Elisp programs that share common conventions for user interfaces, key bindings, extensions, and configuration. But you don’t run all those programs at once, only the ones you need, and the rest of the “bloat” is not used. So in that sense it does feel more like an operating system than a program, in a good way. But Emacs itself is modular in a way similar to Unix. Just that instead of being modular in the sense of many executables exchanging text streams, it is modular in the sense of many Elisp programs passing lists or buffers around. The Unix philosophy implemented at another layer of abstraction, in a sense. EDIT: Dired mentioned here is a good example: It is a file manager implemented as a separate "Elisp program" that communicates with coreutils under the hood.