[mrottenkolber]

Never used Genera or the likes (am a youngster). I have seen screencasts though. I have been mostly influenced by Acme of Plan 9 and the Oberon UI (also only through secondary sources). I am also stuck on UNIX so I had to deal with that in some way, also I know my way around UNIX so I felt it was easier to integrate UNIX with CL instead of learning a new OS.

My time with UNIX also made me fond of text files so a lot of my "stack" is optimized for plain text interfaces (e.g. the email client started because I didn't like the directory structure of maildir). Also I wanted my mail in a git repository.

> Did you build this all from what you thought you'd rather use

Kind of, its a compromise between what I wanted (a CL OS, optimized for simple text interfaces and CL hacking) and what was in reach. At some point I decided to go the path of least resistance, move my CL stack closer to the UNIX/Slackware stack and reuse and integrate as much open source software as possible.

The result is a very thin layer of CL and Elisp code and some CL apps which combine to a UI I feel comfortable with.