Also, yes, I mean: most computer works are about information manipulation, retrieving, filtering, composing information. Such information might be text, images, videos, audios, "databases" etc and to manipulate, filter and compose we need something to do so as we wish.
Still today there are no such "comprehensive tool" for anything like that, our modern most advanced tools are Notebook UIs like Jupyter or experiments like Wolfram Alpha. Emacs with org-mode is far more flexible than them and actively developed by still limited in graphics and usage terms. Xerox workstations of course are from a different era, and much less computing power but still they have had something, and they dream to evolve in that way.
Modern Smalltalks seems to have forgotten this part, much focused on "the programming side", modern systems can't even reach something like old ones since they are "individual products" with very limited IPCs...
Funny you mention that as lately I was fantasizing of a good, friendly and powerful terminal based[1] IDE for Smalltalk that you should be able to use to connect to running images.
Curious, why you look for terminal-based environment? I understand that for CLI we have efficient FLOSS network connectivity (ssh) while for GUIs even if some good enough tools exists, some FLOSS (Apache Guacamole) they are pretty limited and complex to support everywhere but, said by one who "born" on unix, CLIs are nice and useful for many things, TUIs not much for reading and writing texts and graphics (framebuffer)... They tend IMO to be just good enough in certain cases, but not as a daily driver.
Do you mean like the Analyst Spreadsheet Package from back-in-the-day?
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ...