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Comment by brucephillips | Hacker News Reader

> My main goal is to build something that feels entirely like a native app.

It's not clear to me how this relates to the question. Emacs and vim are native apps.

Maybe we're using different definitions of "native". In the most common case, both of these editors use the cross-platform "VT-100 UI Toolkit" (e.g. ansi escape codes in your terminal emulator), regardless of platform. Some exceptions do exist. But native as it's being used in relation to this project refers specifically to whatever frontend framework is 'the standard' for a given platform, where one exists.

Ah, I see the miscommunication now. To me, native apps are those that have access to the kernel, as opposed to web apps or bytecode.

> > Emacs and vim are native apps.

> In the most common case, both of these editors use the cross-platform "VT-100 UI Toolkit" (e.g. ansi escape codes in your terminal emulator), regardless of platform.

I daresay that the single most common way to deploy emacs is as an X11 editor, followed by a macOS editor, followed by a vt100 console editor. Emacs is a fully GUI programme, and has been for decades at this point.

Okay fair point, my emacs experience is limited to installing spacemacs once while procrastinating.

I'd be careful about such conclusions without a study. It certainly doesn't fit my usage. I'm at least twice as likely to hit "emacs -nw" for a quick edit than launch the GUI version. Being useful in a terminal is a critical requirement for me.

> I'm at least twice as likely to hit "emacs -nw" for a quick edit than launch the GUI version.

I think that alone marks you as an unusual emacs user; the standard pattern for using emacs is to leave it running all the time (either in a window, or as a dæmon), not to launch new instances. But yes, it would be interesting to have numbers.

> Being useful in a terminal is a critical requirement for me.

Oh, certainly; in fact, I have 'vi' aliased to 'emacsclient -t' these days for just that reason. It's awesome to have a powerful, extensible editor available in the terminal.

What do you find that achieves for you that an X11 emacs running a server doesn't?

I have EDITOR set to emacsclient (and some other aliases) and I find it far more convenient than an in-terminal editor, especially when combined with sudoedit.

> What do you find that achieves for you that an X11 emacs running a server doesn't?

I only use it for quick edits to files, when I don't want to turn my head from my terminal to my emacs window. Yeah, it's just a bit lazy …

Indeed. To me "native" implies that the app will also use the typical keyboard shortcuts that are native to the OS. For example, copy to clipboard via Ctrl+C on Windows and Cmd+C on macOS. Is that the case with Xi?

As currently architected, the frontend is responsible for sending the core events such as "copy", "delete to start of line", or "insert 'a'". On xi-mac, the default experience is intended to closely match the behaviour of other native Cocoa apps, and to generally respect platform idioms.

They aren't webapps but they're each a different ecosystem and workflow entirely separate from the rest of the OS. You can add integration to various parts of the OS via extra scripts/plugins but that you need to do so proves the point. With Xi it seems the goal is to have a powerful shared core but the UI frontends are tailored for the OS/DE they're meant to be run in rather than having one generic cross-platform frontend.

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