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Comment by jacobmoe | Hacker News Reader

People like to say that emacs isn't an editor but a platform, or just a lisp interpreter that comes with text editing libraries. But is it? The emacs development team sees it as a text editor, I think. If it was just an interpreter, I can imagine many editors built on top of it, with spacemacs being just one. If it's an editor, than wouldn't you expect the good ideas from projects like spacemacs to make its way into the emacs core? I wonder if the emacs core team should go all in with the emacs-as-a-platform idea and focus on just the core features, letting projects like spacemacs to create an appealing editor.

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well, that's kinda been the way emacs has been for a while now. They recently added a really easy package managing system which allows for emacs to look and behave drastically different from each other. About making its way into the core, the dev team won't really put anything into the core unless other things in the core require them.

Getting the dev email list to agree to a change of something that is easily added through packages or just init.el/emacs.d/ is difficult if not impossible. But this is a good thing: opinionated workflows are adaptable but not forced on seasoned veterans and newbies alike. Getting good packages into elpa or tasteful additions into core that augment emacs is always welcomed it seems.

Join the development list and just follow discussions. It's always fun to see really smart people talking about new code, extensions, opinions, and the new maintainer John seems to want to do a good job and produce some nice software. I've got it going to my gmail under a label and never filling my inbox so it gives a nice reading break every now and then at work.

Emacs core requires FSF copyright assignment. Most of the configurations in Spacemacs use third party extensions which don't have the assignment.

But being non-core is not really a barrier to installation in my opinion. In many ways it is a plus, allowing for out-of-cycle releases and to experiment / break compatibility at their own pace.

It's already this way in a sense. There are many things that seem more "solid" to me in Vim because there is a default implementation that is baked into the editor. In Emacs, there are several different libraries and various language modes may interact with one or another of those libraries. Many of the various libraries are included in the default Emacs distribution. For example, (IIRC) there are 2 or 3 "folding" libraries that are in Emacs, while Vim just has folding baked in. Sometimes this makes Emacs seem less consistent to me than Vim does.

That is excellent idea. I am learning now and using spacemacs and it makes total sense to have focus on core and allow other teams to be focused on ui and usability.

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