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On the other hand, don't look at emacs as a tool on Unix, look at it as a tool like Unix... it has a few simple abstractions (text, buffers, windows) and presents to the User a programmable shell to act on those abstractions.

>Yeah, Emacs follows UNIX philosophy only in the edge case of "doing one thing" being doing everything that's even tangentially related to or representable as tex.

I think that is the right idea, but it can be reworded to:

>Yeah, Emacs follows UNIX philosophy only in the case of "doing one thing" by being an interactive, turing complete, generic text processor.

In short: Emacs runs elisp and does it well.

Agreed. One of the pillars of Unix philosophy is stdin/out and pipes. Emacs balatantly ignores them.

If it didn't ignore them, how would it use them and what would it be able to do better? Genuine question.