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Comment by rekado | Hacker News Reader

Emacs is not just an editor and mention it next to vim or mutt indicates that you misunderstand what Emacs tries to be.

Emacs gives you tight integration for everything that could possibly be represented as a buffer. Emacs is programmable glue between applications, a better "shell".

The desire to do all things in Emacs is because Emacs lets you do it and because it reduces context switching. For more on why one would want to make Emacs do things that are not traditionally the job of an editor, see also https://elephly.net/posts/2016-02-14-ilovefs-emacs.html

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I get the point about Emacs being a OS, but don't you think it's kind of a dated clunky OS? Like "Mac OS 9" was, lacking memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Why would anyone want to be limited by technology when the rest of the world is moving forward?

The roots of the current macOS are much older than the classic Mac OS. Is that moving forward? What does it even mean?

It means that the OP doesn't know that he's talking about.

It isn't uncommon to mistake 'new' with 'better'.

But, just as it is a mistake to blindly cling to the old and comfortable, neophilia is a trap in itself. And it is a bit amusing to watch, for instance, new crops of editors repeat the same mistakes old ones got through in whatever GUI drag is trendy is this week.

For your Mac OS comparison to make any sense, you'd have to point to something comparable to lacking memory protection. So... what would that be? I have a sneaking suspicion you mean GUI integration with whatever OS you use, but I'd like to be clear.

> But, just as it is a mistake to blindly cling to the old and comfortable, neophilia is a trap in itself.

Agree, there is always must bee a meedle path.

To answer your question about MacOS 9 comparisons, I meant technical limitations, like single threading issues, ui capabilities, you know. I may be wrong, though, I haven't paid attention to Emacs intervals for a while. Modern web-based platforms are far from perfect, but they are reacher.

Operating systems that pre-dated MacOS 9 had pre-emptive multitasking. MacOS "moved forward" by adopting one of them (NeXT OS) and building their platform on top of it. I'm really unsure what point you're trying to make here.

I'm trying to say, that at that period of time, MacOS 9 was stuck in the past, even compared to Windows. This was in reference to Emacs limitations as a platform.

I'm still using the GNU system as my OS :) But Emacs is a very important "sub-environment" in my OS; it has a very privileged position in the process tree, much like a browser.

Emacs lacks a couple of features and I think it's fair to say that this represents a limit, but I don't see "the rest of world [...] moving forward" in this area. I don't know of any other system that is as ambitious as Emacs, a system that embraces the overflowing kitchen sink and isn't content with just being called an editor.

Out of the box it's terrible, I give you that. Clunky and dated are too nice for describing the defaults. But underneath the extremely conservative and curmudgeon defaults lies a very flexible environment that cannot be approximated with a set of text applications running inside a terminal emulator. It's a pale shade of the same colour that made Lisp Machines so attractive.

Yeah, except no.

The vi vs. Emacs editor wars are over and Emacs lost. The new struggle is between vim and modern IDEs and IDE-like editors (Atom, Sublime, etc.).

There are reasons for this. Vim is retro like beehive hairdos; Emacs is retro like casual workplace sexism. The buffer implementation in Emacs sucks. Once you start opening huge files or running shell tasks that spew a lot of output, Emacs chokes hard and because it's not multithreaded, pegs your CPU and locks up your terminal, in buffer sizes that modern editors handle easily.

Also, Elisp is slow, contains warts the Lisp community has long since fixed, and is in general a millstone around everybody's necks.

Also, the UI. Just... the UI. Wonder why the best way to get a young developer to use Emacs is to reskin it like vim (evil-mode, Spacemacs)?

Editors, even all-in-one kitchen-sink editors, have moved on from Emacs. Just let it go.

I don't think your comparisons are constructive.

I learned vim first and later switched to Emacs because it allows me to integrate all tasks in the same work environment. The defaults are admittedly terrible and it's certainly far from perfect. But I don't see any alternative that works better for the things that I use Emacs for. I am looking forward to eventually be using Guile instead of Elisp, though.

Curious that you mention the UI as a negative(?) --- the Emacs UI is pretty good actually and it's very extensible.

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