[nicklaf]

I wonder if there is some sort of inverse relationship between having comprehensive features, thereby being self-contained (think Smalltalk), versus having a continuous dialog with the imperfect outside environment (think perl). I'm sure this is implicit in the famous "Worse is Better" essay, if not explicit.

I mean: the author of tmux could have bundled the package with a comprehensive environment. But what really is there, beyond Unix and the browser? If it exists, people haven't heard if it, and even if they had, would just as soon reinvent it. At any rate, the inevitable imperfections and inpedance-mismatch with users' existing workflow / UI would surely invite brutal criticism. (For example, when Plan 9 came up here a few years back, a big chunk of the discussion was about how ugly the GUI seemed to them!)