[woodchuck64]

> What I think the programming environment world needs (not just vim) is a standard way for user interfaces to talk to tools.

Brilliant, that way the ultimate IDE is simply your desktop.

Coming from linux, given the choice between an IDE and a bunch of shell windows running vim, gcc/g++, make, gdb, etc., I've always picked the latter. But it's missing tool communication. Now if we had some standard based on IPC that vim/gcc/g++/make/gdb/other-tools could all recognize...

[gcr]

This is basically all that emacs provides: glue between programs, and maybe a really thin GUI layer for interacting with them.

Which, as I'm sure many will ravenously point out, leads back to the "encapsulated environment" problem; emacs then integrates these disparate programs so tightly that I'm now locked into it.