To my eyes, NeWS does not look like a mistake. On the contrary, it looks beautifully engineered.
Among other advantages, I can imagine a world where PostScript would be used for building user interfaces: a document in screen and print would look the same, without need for writing conversions like, e.g. HTML+SVG -> PDF when someone needs to somehow print a web form quickly. And perhaps the old principles of typography and the experience in typesetting beautiful books with PostScript could be more easily applied to UI design.
Your post prompted me imagine a nightmare/utopia in which TeX was used for building user interfaces.
This was followed by a vision of a window system built on ROFF.
Someone taking a verbose format for writing text and adding feature and feature to it until it supports UI applications? Jesus, that's a horrific vision.
Hope something like that will never see the light of day.
Perhaps all that will be implemented is character cell windowing systems.
And Doom. Definitely Doom.
Hurray for the MGR window system!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR
>ManaGeR or MGR was an early windowing system originally designed and developed for Sun computers in 1984 by Stephen A. Uhler, then at Bellcore.
>MGR featured overlapped, asynchronous windows and an applications interface that was both machine and network independent.
>Each MGR window had support for both character terminal operations as well as basic graphics operations. It was controlled by mousing pop-up menus, by keyboard interaction, and by escape sequences written on pseudo-terminals by client software.
>The system was presented at the USENIX Fourth Computer Graphics Workshop in 1987 as "MGR - a Window System for UNIX".[1] The entire MGR source code was posted to the comp.sources.unix Usenet newsgroup, Volume 17, Issue 1, in January 1989.[2]
MGR was the largest posting to ever appear in comp.sources.unix:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sources.unix/GG...
Also Chris Torek, Mark Weiser and others developed "Maryland Windows" at the University of Maryland Computer Science Department, based on the Gosling Emacs screen redisplay code and terminal drivers. It was very good over slow modems because it used Emacs's intelligent redisplay algorithm aka "Ultra-hot screen management package" -- the one with the skull and crossbones.
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/display.c.txt
Maryland Windows source code:
http://cd.textfiles.com/sourcecode/unix_c/languags/c/mw.tar
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/net.emacs/yXfZGeHJrNY/...
Of course now lots of people just use emacs with shell buffers as a windowing system, inside of something like screen or tmux.
There is an X window manager written entirely in elisp for GNU Emacs, EXWM, that was started in 2015:
https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
I have been using it exclusively on my machines for the past three years. By far the best computing environment I have used.
In 2018 I stumbled on XWEM, an X window manager in elisp for XEmacs that was developed from 2003 to 2004: