I was wondering how difficult it would be to separate the display (front-end) and server (back-end) in emacs.
I’m not familiar with the emacs code base, but I poked around for a couple of hours, and couldn’t find any centralized I/O abstraction, just #ifdefs (this difficulty was discussed in Unify the Platforms: Cairo+FreeType+Harfbuzz Everywhere (except TTY)). I want emacs to have first class support for remote development (running emacs as a server, and connecting a gui front end to it from another computer). This seams like the first step. Any help would be appreciated.

Sincerely Ian