Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

Article note: The Cat (and to a lesser degree the other Raskin designs like Swiyftcard or Archy) still stands as one of the most compelling "Alien artifact" separate evolutionary lines in computing. I do a lot of work out of a folder of text files with an editor and grep for the generality, and it's shockingly analogous to the cat model. In many ways the paradigm is a stronger take on "Everything is the same, searched and manipulated with a common set of tools" than Unix or even Plan9, but with the corresponding greater challenge at handling things that aren't suited to that model.