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Comment by tadfisher | Hacker News Reader

Emacs is so fantastic, I just want it to have a UI that can compete with VS Code and IntelliJ.

I also understand that its UI limitations are also part of its strength, as being fundamentally text-based results in a consistent UX no matter what esoteric modes you activate.

I wonder if there's a middle ground; say, by allowing for frames & windows to have "chrome" that can take up some space on their edges and allow drawing widgets via GTK or Cairo and plumbing input events back into Lisp. Then we can have stuff like sidebars, status areas, code lenses, etc. that behave like modern editors, and people that don't like it can just leave the "chrome" option disabled.

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> Then we can have stuff like sidebars, status areas, code lenses, etc. that behave like modern editors

What's stopping you from doing that in emacs now? That sounds like a bunch of stuff we can already have?

All of that has been around for a quarter of a century (since XEmacs and GNU Emacs 21 at least). See CEDET for an example: http://cedet.sourceforge.net/

CodeLens is just some text properties and tool-tips/pop-ups.

This is what lsp-mode does https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode/blob/master/examples/h...

> I wonder if there's a middle ground;

I hope that McCLIM (https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/) can some day fill that role, or a project that is similar to McCLIM.

I cannot imagine a better way of interacting with a computer than to have objects that can be manipulated both interactively and with Lisp code. Emacs is already close to that ideal, but I think we could do even better.

I wondered what would happen if you applied this philosophy to a game engine. Imagine Unity, but with the ability to open a REPL in-game and run all of your code interactively.

I managed to accomplish this somewhat with Lua. Designing the engine so that all the cool things like creating and equipping items, generating maps, etc. are in public APIs you can use interactively has given me a lot of power. I'm not sure if the benefits offset the maintainability tradeoff, but I'm somehow continually excited to sit down and mess around with it. Taken as a single-user experience, being the only person to understand the system and write more code, it is almost a dream come true.

Arcadia seems like what you described. https://github.com/arcadia-unity/arcadia

Also see: Show HN: Real-time multiplayer games with cubes. Early feedback on dev docs?[1]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26109153

https://github.com/cbaggers/cepl https://youtu.be/6pMyhrDcMzw

There is no reason you can't do this now, Inter process communication is a thing.

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