Well Emacs can almost but not quite be everything of course.

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.

The unstated distinction you are making is between a program a novice can use for word processing and a program that requires some level of experience. I will grant that ed/edlin/nano are not word processors. But excluding emacs from the category is just as absurd as including ed.

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.

No, I'm not making that distinction. I'm just saying that text editors and word processors have historically and up to this day been somewhat different beasts written for different audiences with different focuses on their features.

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.

WordPerfect was great because it was essentially a text editor with a markup language. When formatting wasn't coming out quite right it could be debugged easily with by pressing the key to "reveal codes".

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.

You need a ruthless discipline to use Word in anger, do everything through styles and nothing "manually" otherwise it all goes to hell. Unfortunately Word makes it all too easy to do.

Which makes it nearly impossible to collaborate with other that don't think like that.

It seems like nobody I work with even knows what styles are.

Wait, can you style text in Emacs? Fonts? Colors? Bold, underline, italics? Isn't that the whole point of a word processor?

Yes you can do all of these things in emacs.

The crucial distinction between a word processor and a text editor is that the word processor hides the formatting instructions from the user, and instead displays formatted text. Text editors display text in all it's glory. Nothing is hidden.