[lilactown]

That's why the joke "Emacs is a great OS, if only it had a good text editor," lives on and has a kernel of truth. It's really not a text editor, it's a LISP VM. It also does actually have a pretty good text editor out-of-the-box.

It's why the vim vs. Emacs "war" isn't really a fight over text editing, but an ideological battle of "one tool that does one thing well" vs. "one tool that has everything I ever need."

Personally, I find integration a huge selling point, and the Unix pipe interface leaves a lot to be desired. Writing some elisp code, or (preferably) installing a well-documented layer/package, is preferable to me. The specific tools I need also happen to be well supported in the Emacs ecosystem.