A bit off-topic, but probably interesting to folks reading these threads:
A quarter-century ago I worked at a little company that made networking ASICs. The guy who did "floorplanning" and layout had his own tool flow based on a set of scripts he had written over the years. Those scripts were written in Emacs Lisp.
I don't know why he picked this approach, although I suspect that he started out with a manual process on much smaller chips and then started automating it. Anyway, I had to compile a 64-bit version of Emacs to run on his 64-bit SPARC machine (back when its 6GB was enormous) so that it would work with our designs. (back then Emacs only used MSBs for its tagged pointers, so 32-bit Emacs could only address half a GB)
I've seen Emacs used for some pretty weird things, but so far this one takes the prize.
I used "Dired" to view text files and move around directories all the time in emacs. Replaced "mc" (midnight commander) for me. Partly because were I'm at MC takes about 30 seconds to start.
you can M-x shell and get a shell in emacs, but that's overkill... but it would be searchable....
emacs even has games.. M-x tetris.
I'm starting to think you might be right about it being an OS.
I don't know why he picked this approach, although I suspect that he started out with a manual process on much smaller chips and then started automating it. Anyway, I had to compile a 64-bit version of Emacs to run on his 64-bit SPARC machine (back when its 6GB was enormous) so that it would work with our designs. (back then Emacs only used MSBs for its tagged pointers, so 32-bit Emacs could only address half a GB)
I've seen Emacs used for some pretty weird things, but so far this one takes the prize.