This hub-and-spoke architecture is the core of acme, the editor of plan 9 aka "unix if it had evolved using its own mantras and didn't choose pragmatism all the

This hub-and-spoke architecture is the core of acme, the editor of plan 9 aka "unix if it had evolved using its own mantras and didn't choose pragmatism all the time". That editor has extremely basic functions built-in, and more complex operations are done by external processes plugged to acme and accessing all buffers directly, with a good, mandatory usage of the mouse. Unfortunately it doesn't have all batteries included by default, so it's not very famous today.