A very popular idea, and one that emacs has done quite a bit with. Vim is coming along (the original vi was not the scriptable machine like emacs so emacs had a head start)<p>This was also the basis for some &#x27;glue&#x27; languages, the one I&#x27;m most familar with was REXX (and later NetREXX) which created a &quot;port&quot; in an application that could be driven by another application. So the text editor could connect to the compiler or debugger&#x27;s Rexx  port and drive it remotely using the editor screen&#x27;s resources for i&#x2F;o. A good place to look at that was the Amiga back in the mid 90&#x27;s.