The terminal of the future

I read the whole thing and at first glance, it seems like a whole NIH list of wishes. We already have alternatives to the terminal, but the article have no mentions of them:

- Emacs (inherited from lisp machines?). A VM which is powered by lisp. The latter make it easy to redefine function, and commands are just annotated functions. As for output, we have the buffer, which can be displayed in windows, which are arranged in a tiling manner in a frame. And you can have several frames. As the buffer in a window as the same grid like basis as the terminal emulator, we can use cli as is, including like a terminal emulator (vterm, eat, ansi-term,...). You can eschew the terminal flow and use the REPL flow instead (shell-mode, eshell,...). There's support for graphics, but not a full 2d context.

- Acme: Kinda similar to emacs, but the whole thing is mostly about interactive text. Meaning any text can be a command. We also have the tiling/and stacking windows things that displays those texts.

I would add Smalltalk to that, but it's more of an IDE than a full computing environment. But to extend it to the latter would still be a lower effort than what is described in the article.

Emacs also has Org-mode and org-babel, which can work a lot like a Jupyter notebook, and can even talk to jupyter kernels. I do a lot in Emacs, especially now that I'm comfortable with GPTel.

I open a poorly aligned, pixelated PDF scan of a 100+ year old Latin textbook in Emacs, mark a start page, end page, and Emacs lisp code shells out to qpdf to create a new smaller pdf from my page range to /tmp, and then adds the resulting PDF to my LLM context. Then my code calls gptel-request with a custom prompt and I get an async elisp callback with the OCR'd PDF now in Emacs' org-mode format, complete with italics, bold, nicely formatted tables, and with all the right macrons over the vowels, which I toss into a scratch buffer. Now that the chapter from my textbook in a markup format, I can select a word, immediately pop up a Latin-to-English dictionary entry or select a whole sentence to hand to an LLM to analyze with a full grammatical breakdown while I'm doing my homework exercises. This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind.

> This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind.

and all it took was a deep understanding of software development, experience with lisp and a bunch of your own time coding and debugging! what a piece of software!

Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging. Emacs is not as clumsy or random as modern user-hostile software -- it's an elegant tool for a more civilized age, and as such is not for everyone.

> Many HN readers grok software development, would likely get a kick out of learning Emacs Lisp, and have time to invest in coding and debugging.

but why would they? what problems are they solving by being able to paste text into your web browsers address bar? or load a pdf into an LLM? or some other incredibly specific-to-you ability youve added?

if simply adding a lisp interpreter to a program is enough to impress people, why not add it to something other than 1970s terminal text editor? surely an LLM plus lisp can do more of these inane tricks than a 70s text editor plus lisp?