A system which is a combination of editor, window system, shell, and user interface and which provides a novel environment for the construction of textual applications such as browsers, debuggers, mailers, and so on. The system combines an extremely lean user interface with some automatic heuristics and defaults to achieve significant effects with minimal mouse and keyboard activity. The user interface is driven by a file-oriented programming interface that may be controlled from programs or even shell scripts. By taking care of user interface issues in a central utility, the system further simplifies the job of programming applications that make use of a bitmap display and mouse.