[skydhash]

I think we went past each other at some point. I was not arguing that you can use Emacs as a terminal emulator. I was talking more about terminals and shell being a way of computing. Emacs is an alternate way of computing.

With terminals, you have the escapes sequences, the alternate screen, the shell capabilities. With Emacs, you have a lisp VM with a huge library of functions and buffers. I still use a normal terminal like xterm and Terminal.app, but I have eat installed and it's working great.

[brabel]

I agree with you, once you have a terminal emulator like the one described in the post you are close to reinventing eMacs. Many have tried over the years, no one succeeded so far.