Comment by anthk

The concept of an XTerm it's far inferior to Emacs either as a REPL with a shell (eshell), the scratch buffer of the whole Elisp environment. Ditto with 9front with remote mounts and device binding. When you can use a remote component you can do NAT by importing /net in the spot from a remote machine. When you import /proc from another one you can suddenly debug processes of another machine.

Acme with shells are still far superior too. I can edit and script the editor's content and panes and run scripts on them. I can reuse Acme as a Mail, Usenet and maybe Irc client on the spot. I can cut, copy and paste with a mouse faster than a keyboard and yet maintain the Sam commands which are like the ex/ed ones but easier for some tasks (recursive searchs) without getting yourself mad with classic regexps. Heck, I can run filters a la vi under Acme but without being bound to a terminal and thus worried about the input/output on pipes.