Thanks but no thanks. Almost all editors let you customize the color and appearance. Few allow you to customize to such a deep extent as Emacs.
What makes Emacs great is that the low-level text editor features are implemented in a compiled language and then exposed to an interpreted language to be composed into the actual editor. If they're not splitting the architecture into a compiled part and an interpreted part, they aren't taking anything from Emacs.
If Emacs was written in Lisp (like Zmacs), then it would have the same flexibility it currently has without having to contain an interpreter of any kind, and the user-written customizations would have the benefit of being compiled to optimized native code. Some things that you can't do in Elisp for performance reasons would be perfectly doable in a Common Lisp version of Emacs.
One of the advantages of emacs is that an insane level of customisation is possible. Or, more practically, the high level of customisation allows for a lot of low-hanging fruit for people to create editor macros that suit their usage.
Lol, incidentally macOS native text fields / text views support a bunch of Emacs keybindings out of box (C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p, C-a, C-e, C-k, C-d off the top of my mind), so any native Mac application with any text input can claim “inspired by Emacs” for free.
What will be interesting to see is if this changes now that zsh (which does not use readline) has become the standard...but alas, if you don't have EDITOR or VISUAL set, emacs is the default there too...
As for those curious, emacs is the readline default because readline is part of the GNU project.
Edit: Your comment was expanded as I was replying / after I replied. From which it’s quite clear you didn’t get my point.
They decided to use emacs bindings because emacs bindings are the system default for macOS programmers.
Apple's developers were also macOS's first users and they started with a terminal long before they had a working UI.
For the record I don't underestimate how much effort Apple puts into system-wide consistent behaviors in macOS. <s>Also, zsh's default keybinding mode is Emacs mode.</s> (Of course, you did mention that.)
Readline compatible keystrokes came from nextstep (sorry, I don’t dare to guess how to capitalize that). Traditional Mac OS used completely different key combinations (command left arrow instead of control-a, for example). Because of that, Carbon apps didn’t support readline-like key combinations (but system input fields did)
The two could happily coexist only because the Mac originally didn’t have control keys (it only got them for supporting terminal programs, as part of trying to make Macs sell better in business), so none of its navigation keystrokes used the control key.
still, I don't like to be harsh. there is a difference between treating this as a serious alternative to a Vim or Emacs (or whatever) and a programmer resume piece. I could see it being quite fun to develop my own editor as a toy project.
Really?
Chalk up another mark on the board of unserious things the Rust community does with its time.
Edit: I'm sure this will be an unpopular, downvoted comment. I just want to say that I think that Rust is a fantastic language with an enthusiastic community. It's just a community that repeatedly demonstrates that it doesn't know what "good" looks like and has the world's worst case of NIH. Something about the community attracts the like minded.
It's kind of a meme at this point.[0,1,2]
It's going to start effecting interviews. I'm saying this as a hiring manager who has to evaluate what projects candidates spend their time on and what they are going to be like to work with. People who oversell their work or don't know how to evaluate value go into the hard pass pile.
And no, I'm not shitting on them for having a hobby project. I'm shitting on them for clearly demonstrating that they don't understand what the very mainstream software they're actively trying to compete with does.
[0]:https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR [1]:http://adventures.michaelfbryan.com/posts/how-not-to-riir/ [2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334510 (which is just the comments here from [1], but also interesting.
It's not a hobby project when you've shipped your Brew into Core and reserved a name.
At that point, we get to make the apples to apples comparisons.
Props to the Arch community for having the good sense to keep this in the AUR.
There are people who take an effort to produce something and then take the extra step to show it to others so they might learn or collaborate. And those people often get comments where their project is being picked apart with a fine-toothed comb, packaged in an abrasive tone.
This happens over and over again in IT. There's plenty of people with insecurities who - for reasons that psychiatrists understand better than me - rejoice in taking others down.
Lots of people would say it's because we are hidden to each other behind the screen and would never say this stuff to a colleague. I guess that's part of the reason why it's so prevalent in HN. Though, I've seen the same style of rhetoric in the industry, face-to-face.
"You should go to back to school before talking about CSS" and plenty of laughing was something directed at me when I suggested that the ´class´ attribute for HTML tags has semantic meaning beyond just hooking up CSS rules to it. I had trouble explaining it, but my colleague with longer industry experience took it as "lol this noob junior programmer doesn't even understand what ´class´ means". He didn't even stop to consider how class attributes can be used through Javascript and beyond, he immediately went for taking me down as fast as possible.
And that f'ing hurt. And after that I have probably been toxic to other people too. I wish I could go back and undo all the times I have hurt someone like that. Totally unnecessarily and without reason. But I can't. That's why the least I can do when someone suggests that "hey, tone it down a bit" is to shut up with the explanations why I am right to say what I'm saying and think whether there's a more constructive way to go forward.
Nevertheless, this project is somebody learning Rust on an intermediate/advanced level. Nothing wrong with that, and people deriding it because it cannot compete with real text editors with millions of man-hours behind them are behaving bit silly. Who knows, one of these exercises might become a great editor some day.