That's interesting -- thanks for sharing! I try to be as erudite in computer history as possible but I still somehow missed this.

I pay homage to the Lisp community w/r/t programming interfaces in this post: https://amasad.me/disintegrated

Genera on the Lisp Machine is very much an embodiment of this graphical command line (or rather just command) user interface. There's quite a lot to it. CLIM (and the open source McCLIM) is the current realisation of this.

There's some documentation about 'Commands' in CLIM II here for example: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lwu41/climuser/GUID_1...

Commands are first class objects which live in command tables and which CLIM can look at to generate bits of UI and allow parameters to be specified. Central to this in CLIM is the idea of presentations - where domain objects are 'presented' onto the screen and the link to the domain object is maintained. That way you can invoke a command on that object in various ways, for example you can type a command name and then click a presented object which is acceptable as a parameter.

The Symbolics S-packages used these concepts to make (I presume) powerful 3d modelling programs back in the day (I haven't used them): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU - sorry for the poor video quality.

https://twitter.com/rainerjoswig?lang=en (lispm on here) sometimes posts interesting things about Genera

Ive been wanting to look into this forever but cant get geneva to run on my system

Genera runs best inside a virtual machine of an old version of Ubuntu. I was able to install it when I followed this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12USa3gU_oU.

Do you think wrapping that all up in a docker container is a bridge too far? I've seen this video before and have thought about installing on this old box I use as a file server but have never got around to it.

ideas have people :)