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Comment by bch | Hacker News Reader

Not directly applicable, but elinks[0] allows ^T (ctrl-T (capital 'T')) while editing a textarea to launch $EDITOR. It's really nice.

Edit: in some instances, it's incredibly useful. For example it makes some cases of gmail more usable/enjoyable than via Firefox. I get all the power of vi and full access to my running system, so I can easily inline code segments or log files into my messages, and not lose editor focus if I bump the mouse, etc :P

[0] http://elinks.or.cz/

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Or mutt if that's where you are going. I can't tell you how many emails I've accidentally sent from the browser that end in :wq

Now I'm jokingly imagining running Emacs and "term" mode with mutt or elinks and running vi to do the editing. It sounds silly on the surface, but I think is a testament to the composability of the tools.

Edit: tested Emacs/elinks, and it works if the TERM is changed from eterm-color to vt100. Hooray for text and Unix.

What is the emacs for? I'm so confused.

I did say "jokingly imagining" above. "Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent text editor."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

Although the OP posted himself, one thing I try to explain to people who don't use Emacs very much is that instead of thinking of it as an editor with a Lisp extension language, it's better to think of it as a Lisp environment with a built in editor. And although people jokingly refer to it as an OS (and even the kitchen sink is included -- as an icon), it's really more like a shell. You have a windowing environment, you can integrate other programs including terminal shells, debuggers, etc, etc. Finally, because it is a full Lisp environment, you have 30+ years of accumulated Lisp programs that you can run (some of which have no equal on any platform).

I used Emacs for 20 years and while I've strayed away from it (got interested in Vim), I'm slowly making my way back. Not for the Emacs keybindings (which are fine), but for the entire elisp ecosystem. So in a way the OP's imaginings are not so far off (although I don't think you can actually run vim inside emacs -- you will need to use Evil mode instead ;-) ).

I used nvi on NetBSD, and indeed it did work if I set TERM=vt100 inside Emacs term (M-x term).

So:

  NetBSD$ env EDITOR=vi emacs
  (M-x term)

  Emacs$ env TERM=vt100 elinks news.ycombinator.com

(go to text area, start editing, ^T, and up pops (n)vi)

I'm a long-time Emacs user as well, but have found myself on vi for last few years, initially as a refresher. There's definitely still a place in my heart for Emacs, though. I think your characterization of Emacs is also fair; I usually describe it as a Lisp VM.

Edit: formatting for clarity(?)

Emacs can serve as a terminal multiplexer, which is the most obvious thing for Emacs to provide in that setup, though as mikekchar said, it does have a lot to offer.

I never quite got the people who run Emacs in screen/tmux; emacs can already do that!

Is there an emacs equivalent of screen -r? (or, if you want to be exciting, -x?)

Sort of. You can run emacs as a daemon and attach to it with emacsclient. Then when you want to detach, you just C-x C-c like usual, or disconnect and let the emacsclient process die. You have to remember to run emacs as a daemon up front, though.

You could also run emacs inside something like dtach or abduco [1], which are a "session managers" like screen or tmux but without the multiplexer.

http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/abduco/

Yes, I was referring to `emacs --daemon`/`emacsclient`.

If you run `emacsclient -a ''` then it will automatically run `emacs --daemon` for you (if it isn't already running), so that you don't need to run it up-front.

Nice, it even has a Javascript interpreter. I use w3m for various things, but the lack of Javascript makes it less than usable for a ton of stuff. The lack of configurable key-bindings also makes me sad.

When it works the JavaScript is limited. I've never gotten it to work.

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