[watergatorman]

I generally agree with Lucas' sentiments re GUIs and in his other article "In Praise of Plain Text."

But I currently select portions of text with a mouse by highlighting it, and then execute programs that accept that selection as input.

I no longer am limited to entire text that would be written to StdOut or piped or redirected and so could be treated as complete text files.

I can currently select and execute programs in a GUI in just 2 steps, using a mouse.

Admittedly, I integrated the <program to execute> into the GUI, but it was relatively simple.

To do this in Linux it looks like I would need to run a port of Plan9's Acme or the Wily editor.

The port of Plan9 is way more than I need, so I will look at Wily.

Maybe there are some other Linux editors that will do what my GUI currently does?

[watergatorman]

Answering my own question, Geany has "Sending text through custom commands" and ability to add custom commands via "Send Selection to->Set Custom Commands"

But it looks like this just replaces the selected text so it may be more for formatting.

I prefer a new window to open so the selected text isn't altered.

I know I can program vEdit+ to do this, but that is not Linux.

[watergatorman]

You need to look at TUIs (Text User Interfaces).