I actually found the other day I have a ROM for Wordwise+, the first word processor I ever used, for the BBC Micro. I might see if I can get away with doing some "real work" in it :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordwise
Do you feel better if section headings are bigger and take up more space than the text you are supposed to be working on:
latex: https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png
org-mode: http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png
org-mode with pd preview: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg
Or is emacs excluded from being a word processor because you can also use it for powerpoint presentations: http://salomie.ro/tudor/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/orgmode_p...
But this is a pretty common distinction, surely?
Words are text, but word processors have historically been focused on preparing documents for printing (or nowdays viewing a visual representation of a printed document onscreen, eg PDF).
They handle differing visual layout (fonts, page breaks, margins, indenting). They are softwrapped and paragraph based not line based. Often they deal with formatting through styles - headers, bullet points, numbering. They usually handle inclusion of tables, images and other non-text elements.
The most common example of a word processor, Word, also handles collaborative writing with tracked changes and notes, and has inbuilt features such as on the fly word count, spelling and grammar checks.
As I said, for a command line word processor look at WordPerfect for DOS or equivalent.
What you are saying (and it is not entirely wrong) is that you can approximate a word processor by matching a text editor with a bunch of other programs (TeX, Pandoc, aspell etc). But that doesn't make the text editor a word processor.
Have you used emacs in the past decade? Some of your requirements are laughable. Softwrapping? visual-line-mode has been baked in since 23. Word count? wordcountmode. Tables? I will take orgtbl mode over the libreoffice/ms-word interface any day. Bullet points? Nothing comes close to orgmode for manipulating/moving/adding bullet points.
Apple's Pages did not get "track changes" until 2012. Was it just a text editor prior to that?
Sidebar: It is kind of funny that you like WP 5.1 and are a lawyer. Were you ever a lawyer in the states? The only people I have ever heard gush over WP5.1 were lawyers. I never realized the fetish was global.
Sure, I can do emacs with softwrapping to write my next legal contract. I can also do text editing in Word for my next LaTex document. But I wouldn't want to.
This is not an obscure distinction to make.
Sidebar: Actually I much prefer a recent Word to WordPerfect 5.1. But the question was command line tools, and WordPerfect 5.1 is a good example of a terminal based document creation tool focused on creating, well, documents. It should be easily possible to make a modern equivalent - a terminal based editor focused narrowly on the creation of the same sorts of documents Word is good at. But I don't know of one, and a tricked out emacs doesn't really get there.
The other thing that made WordPerfect great was their technical support. Free and unlimited over the phone...and they new what they were talking about and if it was a genuine bug, they would have an engineer call you back on their dime. Or at least that's what happened when I found a bug in Summer of 1992.
Microsoft Word buries its formatting. Sometimes it's easier to just nuke a file to text and reformat the whole thing than to try to solve conflicting formats overlapping.
It seems like nobody I work with even knows what styles are.
Most serious document production company (publishing companies and newspapers; legal firms are probably less sophisticated) have a similar pipeline within their firm. Text (raw or rigidly styled), version-controlled, running through a pipeline of reviews and signoffs and markup and arrangement.
> I don't know of a modern equivalent
We'll think much more in terms of snippets of styled data, and its lifecycle. We'll laugh at memories of these laborious monolithic word processing systems, and how we thought that this was productivity.
LyX is already (mostly) there: http://lyx.org While it's mostly LaTeX based, I could easily see it using any number of backends (another feature of pipelining underneath), such as markdown, roff, etc.
You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still.
WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.