is it a good idea? Also, the way that the GUI is to be designed is it has sort of a picture inside of a picture. the idea that every application's "result" (which are command-line programs) are displayed in 1 window. this requires ability to treat the inner window as the actual application. complicated? rightly so ... imagine tabbed browsers where you have multiple pages (applications) open and each one is displayed in exactly the same space. now imagine that above the tabs there are a bunch of actions that can be done to the current page. actions change (some dissappear and some appear) depending on the page. for example: an html page might have the regular copy/cut/paste, while an image might also have a zoom slider.

Considering that someone has already done it, it's probably not a bad idea.