I think a misunderstood part of Emacs is that this is exactly what it is—-it’s just glue, but instead of being in a command-oriented environment, it’s in an editor-oriented environment. You run the same Unix tools but glue their results together into a text buffer with a full programming language that then lets you programmatically edit the results.

People joke about Emacs being an OS but it’s really just a different kind of shell, oriented towards text editing instead of issuing commands.