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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Emacs is an OS that lacks a decent text editor (the joke is as old as Emacs).

Well... For me it also have a decent text editor... The bad point is that it lack a bootloader+kernel+userland that let me ditch basic Linux kernel...

GuixSD is nicely integrated but Emacs Guile port is not "official" and "mature" enough to have it really as a sole OS, also GuixSD use bash by default, not Emacs at login...

For now I'm happy enough with NixOS+EXWM despite few annoyance not directly caused by Emacs :-)

Would you mind sharing your nix config?

Since I plan to re-write it in org and cleanup I do not publish it however here http://ix.io/1vf0 there is a quick redacted NixOS config of my desktop :-)

When I have time I will port both NixOS, homeManager and Emacs config in org, with proper docs. But I do not know when I will do that...

Not funny. Evil mode was released in 2013.

I tried Evil mode a few months ago and went back to Vim very quickly. It's one of the best Vim plugins out there, but it still misses a few features and it also behaves differently in a couple of situations.

It never really feels like Vim, more like a minefield of unknown shortcuts with a layer of Vim bindings on top. But I get why some people like it, if you can't stand modal editing then Emacs is a great choice.

One of the selling points of neovim was to make it more easily embedded into other programs.. doesn’t seem like anyones trying to do so from a quick googling though; maybe one day there can be true unification of the holy editors

I suspect this is quite unlikely. A main reason for emacs being good is that it has a good programming language for extensions and good primitives to support it. This is in comparison to eg vimscript (hopelessly bad) and javascript (extremely mediocre). Emacs Lisp has several advantages:

1. Language is more extensible because of macros so dealing with editor state can be hidden.

2. Language is more dynamic with advice and eval-after-load and such is extensions can play well together

3. For all it’s difficulties, having buffer-local variables and dynamic scope seems to make writing extensions easier

As far as I can tell, making Emacs cooperate with neovim would require shoehorning the editor model of one editor into that of the other, likely causing many extensions and expected behaviours to break.

There is, I think, a difference between making a new application that can use neovim for editing some bits and making an old (or, indeed, very old) application switch to using neovim for editing.

NeoVim supports Lua as well.

Could you elaborate on some of the specific features that Evil was missing? Aside from a couple of exceptions, any differences from Vim are considered bugs.

Most of the differences I noticed revolved around automatically changing indentation levels(one of the best ways to get uninstalled) and autocompletion which sometimes didn't work(file name completion) and once it refused to autocomplete a certain string without removing the underscores first.

I'm sure a lot of this can be fixed by changing some configuration options, but I don't see a reason to change the editor just for the sake of it. Emacs is awesome in some ways, but it's not my cup of tea.

There is no reasonable way to emulate always on

    :set virtualedit=all

Picture mode is not reasonable. The cursor must go where I put it and stay there, not move in any direction I did not choose.

spacemacs.

That's much more recent than I expected

There were other vi emulation modes before that. Vile was one. I believe evil is much better, though (I never used vi emulation before evil so I have no firsthand experience here).

It's about the time hipsters started to take an interest in vim so not too surprising.

I realize this is a joke, but there seem to be a lot of people who are really attached to the interpretation of Emacs as a little Lisp Machine.

Emacs is an ok lisp machine. It is much better than many common lisp distributions which are typically not very good lisp machines (I believe the proprietary systems are better in this regard).

Clinging on to Emacs as a lisp machine can mean clinging onto the more dynamic customisable extensible computation environment epitomised by the lisp machine, and in this sense I think it is more understandable

> Emacs is an ok lisp machine

GNU Emacs is an extensible text editor, but not a Lisp Machine. A Lisp machine is a computer with a Lisp OS on the metal. This means the OS itself is written in Lisp and not just some specialized application, interfacing to a foreign underlying OS. A Lisp OS has also an open GUI and not just an editor-buffer-based UI.

With GNU Emacs the extensibility ends when one calls an OS tool or an OS library - for a Lisp Machine there is no such distinction.

GNU Emacs is a mostly single-threaded editor, with a horrible user interface and heroic efforts from users to deal with thousands of modes and keystroke combinations.

None of the extensible Lisp applications are 'Lisp Machines': not Autocad, not Audacity, not iCAD, not Creo Elements, not GNU Emacs, not OpusModus, not Macsyma, ... They are Lisp applications which expose a development interface and a development environment (yes, Autocad has Lisp development tools) and users are writing complex applications on top of those.

On a real Lisp Machine, an Emacs-like text editor is just one application and one interface style.

Emacs should just embrace it and make a distro.

Call it "Emix"

As a long-term emacs user, I obviously disagree, but it is a good joke. ;-)

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