In May 1993 I posted these specs for an ideal word-processor that I called DecentWrite.
It quickly became clear, though, that what was really needed was a full DecentOS, which I usually describe these days as:
"...an OS built around a highly refined toolkit that combines the best of Emacs and HyperCard and ResEdit and Frontier and Netscape, plus all the little indispensible utilities for memory management and clipboard management and key-command management, etc etc etc." [cite]
[Most of the following links are my postings to comp.human-factors, via Deja.com.]
All document-editing will share a common OS syntax [more] as a way of using orthogonality to achieve exponential power gains [more] [older]. [more on usual/special dimension]
The first version may be ascii-art only as a proof of concept.
It should boot quickly and recover fully from crashes [more].
It needs to keep a running history-log of its actions at varying granularity, from keystroke up [more].
Central to DecentOS will be a universal Swiss-Army parser I've termed the first-cut parser that will intelligently handle conventional email markup like *bold* or '>'-style equotes.
Because it handles HTML as well, it will also be a Web browser and filesystem browser [more].
The window-manager will work across applications, allowing layers and groups, all fully scriptable. It will be intelligent about shrinking information-display regions. When it comes time to dismiss a window of any sort, a common palette of dismissal-options will probably be offered [older].
DecentOS should include extremely smart URL handling and build an AltaVista-equivalent database of visited websites.
It should eventually have a full model of the user's behavior patterns.
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