> (Yes, it gives me shivers just thinking about how much each of those technologies sucks when you think about how good it all could be.) I can tacitly agree t

> (Yes, it gives me shivers just thinking about how much each of those technologies sucks when you think about how good it all could be.) I can tacitly agree that using vim running in a terminal to write LaTeX is not the easiest way in the world to write LaTeX. However, terminals do not suck. Bash sucks a bit, vim sucks in ways this project aims to fix, but terminals are absolutely awesome. A terminal is a dead-simple API for interacting with the user. Want to display text? Write to fd 1. Want to read some input? Read from fd 0. Want to control the cursor or change the colour? Write a special sequence of characters to fd 1, that's supported by every regular terminal emulator. There is even support for getting mouse events. Yes, it's text-only but that is enough in a lot of cases. And it's very simple. And you get it for free the moment your program starts. There is no opening connections to X, no initialising GUI libraries, no callbacks, no need to design a GUI. It's just there. It's always there. Try coming up with a GUI system that has an API as simple as that. The only thing I can imagine is something that consumes HTML written to fd 1 and renders it nicely. But note that HTML can and will be malformed, and malformed HTML can and will be parsed differently by different "HTML terminal emulators". Plus, if you want to do that, just write javascript and stick it in a .html file.