I generally agree with Lucas' sentiments re GUIs and in his other article "In Praise of Plain Text."

But I currently select portions of text with a mouse by highlighting it, and then execute programs that accept that selection as input.

I no longer am limited to entire text that would be written to StdOut or piped or redirected and so could be treated as complete text files.

I can currently select and execute programs in a GUI in just 2 steps, using a mouse.

Admittedly, I integrated the <program to execute> into the GUI, but it was relatively simple.

To do this in Linux it looks like I would need to run a port of Plan9's Acme or the Wily editor.

The port of Plan9 is way more than I need, so I will look at Wily.

Maybe there are some other Linux editors that will do what my GUI currently does?