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Comment by siraben | Hacker News Reader

Definitely. The notion that "everything is a buffer" is a powerful one. Take something as simple as the incremental search functionality. Interfaces in other programs often don't have searchable content, OTOH any buffer you use in Emacs can be searched, sorted, and processed just as you would in a text file.

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> Interfaces in other programs often don't have searchable content

Don't even mention the luxury of "searchable", isn't it just frustrating that Windows still forbids you from selecting and copying text on a message box? If a program displays an error message, you have to transcribe everything by hand before you can do a web search...

ctrl-C Has worked in message boxes for years.

Interesting, appears to be a feature since Windows 7. TBH, I migrated to Gnome 2 back in the days of Windows XP, so never noticed it. Thanks for the tip!

Don’t quote me (I haven’t used Windows in years), but I believe this feature has existed for much longer than Windows 7.

Yeah, it was there in Windows XP too. Though TBH this assumes an application uses the native dialog box for messages and many applications make their own. For example Delphi (at least the older ones) applications do not seem to support it. However some applications may implement it themselves (e.g. Lazarus does support it but it uses its own formatting).

I think at least windows 2000 had that for native dialog boxes.

Heh, then I could easily say the same for the lack of regexp search/undo tree and so on in text boxes. When will Windows ever add those functionalities? Extensibility really makes all the difference. Emacs is perhaps the most successful Lisp machine.

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