[kiba]

Of course, only those with a programming skillset have any chance in hell in realizing the benefit. The marketeers, the doctors, and the mac artist would care less. All they want is a shiny UI with their inefficient workflow.

I suspect Usability designers would probably only care about easy to learn interface over the hard to remember but extremely efficient keyboard commands.

Emacs is a perfect example of this. Extremely efficient and very good at what it do, but it requires a lot of learning for the user. However, the benefit will paid off for the learning curve thousand of times over.

[asdflkj]

Programming is only an impressive-sounding "skillset" and not a simple skill, like riding a bicycle (at least in its rudimentary form), because of how awful the interfaces are between simple code you write and things happening that make a difference in your life. Maybe this problem will eventually be solved not by a better Linux UI philosophy, but by things like Heroku.

"A better UI philosophy" wouldn't even have to be anything new. It's just the classic modular Unix way--the thing that makes shell scripts so easy and satisfying. It should have been extended to GUI. I would guess that someone tried, but it didn't catch on. The idea is too obvious.