Do one thing well. My text editor shouldn't be managing child processes or SSHing or trying to be a visual Git interface, and Vim does a great job displaying my code so I can understand it.
Emacs, as has been said time and again, is not a text editor. It is, if anything, a development shell. It contains a text editing program (the default program), and that program does not manage child processes or SSH or Git.
You could also take the stance that Emacs _is_ a program that "does one thing well:" develop programs. That's the actual task of importance. Text editing is a secondary, ancillary task that owes its importance entirely to the archaic practice of representing complex interrelationships between data and operations on those data as a static linear stream of ASCII-encoded bytes.
Unfortunately, almost all programming languages are like this (hence, "languages"), but if you ever use Emacs to edit Lisp, you'll find that it's far less like text editing than it is like directly manipulating the abstract structure of the program. It does a reasonable job trying to replicate this experience in other languages, but when you have utterly inane constructions like seventeen-precedence-level infix notation, there's only so much you can do.
or like Vim! (as in Evil)
If you stop and think about it, it's really pretty much impossible to define the "one thing" a code editor does.
Forcing the user build everything out of shell pipelines is not the goal, and achieves nothing. At some point, it is appropriate to build the aggregate and combine these functionalities for the user so that he doesn't have to do it himself. And in many cases, you end up reimplementing the thing because it is more efficient that way. The shell utility is still there for the user should he need it.
Use ed to edit, and pick a side in the more/less wars if you want to read it.
I'm not a vim user, but I use it to replace less because syntax highlighting is the bee's knees: (you may need to change `vim74` to whatever it is on your system.)
alias less='/usr/share/vim/vim74/macros/less.sh'
less Makefile +400
pygmentize foo.py | less -rIt also does a great job managing child processes and SSHing. (Or FTPing, or speaking whatever other protocol you need to use to access remote files.) I can't speak to it as a visual Git interface, but I don't doubt it's at least reasonably good at that, too.
"Do one thing well" is a good start, sure. But why not aspire to more?
Emacs provides a lisp implementation. People have used this lisp implementation to write ftp clients, web browsers, and yes even text editing functionality; you then use emacs to load some of that lisp code and execute it. I don't say the Bourne shell fails at "doing one thing well" since people write shell scripts and run them from within the shell.
And Emacs has a command line for its stuff: "M-x".
And if you really want to have separate executables you can do that with small 'emacs --eval' wrappers.
mkdir ~/tmp/foo
scp -r user@host-a:/foo/bar/* ~/tmp/foo
scp -r ~/tmp/foo/* user@host-b:/foo/bar
rm -rf ~/tmp/foo
ssh user@host-a 'cd /foo/bar; tar -cf - .' | ssh user@host-b 'cd /foo/bar; tar -xvf -'
cp -r /user@host-a:/foo/bar/* /user@host-b/foo/bar
ssh user@host-b
ls -R /foo/bar
ls -R /user@host-b/foo/bar
Oh, and lest I forget, if I want to edit a remote file in Vim, I have to either ssh to that host and invoke vim there, or scp the file here and invoke local vim on it, or deal with sshfs or something -- the latter of which might seem like a perfect solution, until you consider that I use all of Linux, OS X, and Windows machines extensively in my daily life, and not all of them do sshfs well or at all. By comparison, eshell's
find-file /user@host/foo/bar/file
There's value in having lots of loosely coupled tools, but it's not the only paradigm worth considering. There's also value in a single, unified interface to an enormous range of tightly integrated functionality; indeed, I've found the result to be something of a combinatorial explosion of productivity.
For example, be an outstanding VM, IDE and a thriving ecosystem of libraries for development in a quite nice (and becoming better with each version) Lisp dialect.
Anyway, that's really a matter of preference. It's ok if you want to tell the world about yours, but try to word it in a way which isn't confrontational for people who have different preferences.
Do you really demand that an OS should only 'do one thing well'? :ø)
sudo aptitude purge emacs
sudo apt-get install vim gvim
gvim