Not to mention, back when the Emacs we know today was created, there weren't many GUI platforms available in the first place. First public release of GNU Emacs - the one with Emacs Lisp - was in 1985, so the Emacs we know is ~3 years older than X11. Emacs added GUI support in 1986[0] - before X11 was a thing (though X itself existed since 1984).
Emacs started as a terminal app, the GUI was added as an afterthought, by pretending it's a TTY. The concept of a "UI thread" wasn't on Stallman's mind back then. It continued to evolve from there; fast forward 35 years, and now we're living with a GUI program that still thinks it's writing to a teletype[1].
Emacs started as a terminal app, the GUI was added as an afterthought, by pretending it's a TTY. The concept of a "UI thread" wasn't on Stallman's mind back then. It continued to evolve from there; fast forward 35 years, and now we're living with a GUI program that still thinks it's writing to a teletype[1].
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[0] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10084842/first-gui-versi...
[1] - https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...