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Comment by rbc | Hacker News Reader

One thing about Emacs, is it's not really just an editor anymore. Comparing it to other editors kind of misses the mark. It's more like an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. It reminds me of Smalltalk environments, say Squeak or Pharo, albeit in a very text oriented way.

The world could probably make room for an integrated Lisp development environment that makes GUI programming more of a first class citizen. Maybe something like Medley Interlisp?

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Emacs runs on terminals too. If you want GUI's, you can choose Common Lisp with Lem and MCCLIM, or that newish web oriented GUI with a similar environment.

And so? Emacs GUI already does tons of things that don't work in terminal:

- It can render different fontsets

- PDFs

- SVG and images

- Emojis and file icons

- Tooltips

- Drag&Drop and better mouse support (scrolling, selection, etc.)

I think it would be great to have a better GUI layer and native web-browser integration. Emacs' evolution doesn't have to be constrained by terminal limitations, and so far it doesn't seem that it was.

With xterm (Kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty) you can have good mouse support, hence you can have tooltip-like popups (AFAICT eldoc or lsp-ui-doc do it), and likely even drag and drop (never used it).

I suspect that with sixel support, and kitty image protocol support, images could be shown, too. At least, Eat, the elisp-based terminal.emulator, manages to show sixel graphics inside Emacs.

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