Edit: more specifically, Archy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) which has its roots in the “Zoomable user interfaces in scaleable vector graphics” paper (which I can’t find a working link for right now)
For those who don't know, Raskin proposes an alternative the reigning windows and folders paradigm, in which your entire OS is a single sheet, a kind of landscape in which you can zoom out to a map view or zoom down into specific words and images, a kind of google maps for your digital space.
It's always stuck with me and I would love to try it. Figma comes to mind as a popular product that's put the idea into practice, but that's a specific use case rather than "your whole digital world".
Not having used a Canon Cat, I can’t speak to the reality of how well that works. But ^S/^R are pretty close.
Of course emacs has all sorts of navigation commands, the Cat had LEAP and PAGE, and part of THI was “one way to do things”. I doubt many rely on incremental search for all navigation in eMacs.
The other concept was the modeless operations on selected text. In the Cat the idea was you could type in some simple math, select it, evaluate it, and replace it with the results. Out of the box I’m pretty sure you can select a Lisp expression and replace it with it evaluated result. Either way, you can see how straightforward it is to do whatever you can imagine to a region in eMacs.
Pretty sure there’s a way you can adapt eMacs to automatically save and reopen all buffers when you exit and re-enter eMacs. What you lose is the undo history.
Anyway, I think that eMacs captures a lot of what THI was trying to do.
> Universal use of text – Raskin argues that graphic icons in software without any accompanying text are often cryptic to users.[11]
It's frustrating helping my mother, or anyone else who doesn't innately understand current design trends, and having to explain what a "hamburger" menu is, or that they need to click the magic three dots and then another vague icon with no accompanying text.