Emacs runs on terminals too. If you want GUI's, you can choose Common Lisp with Lem and MCCLIM, or that newish web oriented GUI with a similar environment.
And so? Emacs GUI already does tons of things that don't work in terminal:
- It can render different fontsets
- PDFs
- SVG and images
- Emojis and file icons
- Tooltips
- Drag&Drop and better mouse support (scrolling, selection, etc.)
I think it would be great to have a better GUI layer and native web-browser integration. Emacs' evolution doesn't have to be constrained by terminal limitations, and so far it doesn't seem that it was.
With xterm (Kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty) you can have good mouse support, hence you can have tooltip-like popups (AFAICT eldoc or lsp-ui-doc do it), and likely even drag and drop (never used it).
I suspect that with sixel support, and kitty image protocol support, images could be shown, too. At least, Eat, the elisp-based terminal.emulator, manages to show sixel graphics inside Emacs.
- It can render different fontsets
- PDFs
- SVG and images
- Emojis and file icons
- Tooltips
- Drag&Drop and better mouse support (scrolling, selection, etc.)
I think it would be great to have a better GUI layer and native web-browser integration. Emacs' evolution doesn't have to be constrained by terminal limitations, and so far it doesn't seem that it was.