RE: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Drew Adams]

> The tool bar especially would work better if it
> looked/acted like it were native.

I suppose I can guess what you mean by "looking"
native, but not what "acting" native means.

My impression is that different apps outside Emacs
can have radically different kinds of tool bars,
both wrt action and look & feel.  And this is so,
even for apps on the same platform, where they are
perhaps all "native".

IMHO, the Emacs tool-bar is something that it makes
sense - at least optionally - to pop up on demand,
rather than take up a fair amount of screen real
estate.

My library tool-bar+.el implements one way of doing
this - by having a menu-bar pseudo-menu `Buttons',
which, when clicked, shows the tool-bar only for one
operation.  Other ways of doing this or something
similar are possible, of course.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ToolBar#ToolBarPlus

(That library also gives you the possibility of
showing the tool-bar only on particular frames,
rather than showing it on all frames or not showing
it on any frame.)