Hacker News Reader

Emacs' built-in text-based web browser

Is it time to update Zawinski's Law to "Every program attempts to expand until it can browse the web."

Not that Emacs isn't already one of the best (if not the number one) examples of "kitchen sink" programs...

Emacs gets a bad rap as a "kitchen sink" program, but it isn't really, any more than something like the Bourne shell or Python. The majority of Emacs' built-ins are things like an elisp interpreter, some text processing stuff, and system libraries. Conversely, most of the really interesting things you can do with Emacs, like web browsing (eww), git repo management (magit), terminal emulation (ansi-term), etc. are really just programs written in elisp. Some of them also happen to be distributed with Emacs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com