So as of earlier this evening I've now got the Listener service hooked up such that I can dictate code into Eric (via an Eric Plug-in talking to the service over DBus). There's still an enormous amount that doesn't work. But that first-light moment has made me rather happy; instead of a collection of little tools/toys, there's something that has the rough shape of a working project.

The actual Eric code so far is about 150 lines, with a lot of that being boilerplate for an Eric plugin. I'll likely do quite a bit more with Eric, as it's my primary IDE, but I want to keep the plugin constrained to a thin shim over DBus services, just the Eric-specific details; that should make it easier to set up e.g. a VIM or Atom plugin as well.