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Comment by rbc | Hacker News Reader

There are times when I wonder if calling GNU Emacs an editor is really descriptive. Editing is just one window, to what's really an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. Compare some Lisp Machine features to the GNU Emacs features:

Zmacs -> Emacs, Zmail -> Rmail (or Gnus), Symbolics Document Examiner -> Info, Lisp Machine Lisp -> Emacs Lisp (both children of Maclisp). There may be other examples that I'm not aware of.

GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that. Maybe its become a sort of Valinor, a realm for uprooted Lisp machine users to continue the craft.

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> GNU Emacs might have started as an editor, but it's certainly grown beyond that

Hence the old joke: "Emacs sure is a great operating system, pity it's missing a good text editor"

It has also inspired "Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail" (Zawinski worked on both XEmacs and Netscape...)

It has a good text editor now, thanks to evil-mode

the actual base standard emacs keybindings are great and always have been, esp if you have a real keyboard

The fun thing is that a bunch of the oldest bindings are essentially a random sampling of keybinds used by different people when original TECO EMACS was coalescing into existence.

But a common pattern was that the systems majorly used with Emacs as the keybindings evolved all had mirrored bucky bits which means instead of using left pinky finger for Control key when hitting C-x C-f many would use right thumb for Control and left hand for X and F.

I mean, the other fun thing is that the vi keybindings are also a product of the really terribly anemic keyboard that the ADM-3A terminal it was developed for had, and was also a product of the conventions developed by line editors like 'ed'.

And so there's nothing virtuously ergonomic about the vim keybindings and people who try to make it seem like there's some UX genius there (and to be fair, also with emacs) are often involved in a rather elitist game of retcon.

Emacs at least evolved on systems that had much richer keyboards, and with the deliberate intent to make use of those extra keys but also make it possible for people to just muck with it and make it whatever they wanted.

In the late 80s, early 90s when I got my start on Unix... I specifically chose emacs over vi because it let me use exotic novelties like... arrow keys.

The left pinky finger would not have been used for hitting left Control in Emacs back then, rather one would have used the left _thumb_; the Control key was positioned beside the space bar on both sides.

To use the left pinky on those keyboards for left Control, you would have to leave the home row completely, and shit your wrists awkwardly....

Not a huge fan of C-x o. Always remap it to M-o. Dunno, maybe my workflow is just bad, but I switch windows a lot.

I generally use windmove, and have Ctrl-Shift-F/B/P/N move to the window in the respective direction.

To call these Lisp Machine features is to skip quite a bit of history :-)

RMAIL, info, etc predate Lisp Machines (ZMacs and EINE have their roots in ITS/TECO Emacs) by quite a bit. They where standard on ITS long before the Lisp Machine came about, and that is really from where GNU Emacs draws much if not most of its inspiration.

I tried ITS under simh and RMAIL had the virtual same interface as today. Ditto with Emacs and Dired.

I think of Emacs as being to Elisp what the JVM is to Java. It's a platform with a whole host of applications, some of which are good and many of which are less good. Examples of applications of great quality include calc, dired, evil, magit, comint, org – you just won't get these outside of the Emacs platform, much like a few years ago you couldn't run Minecraft outside of the JVM platform.

well it's like... emacs takes the "editor buffer" concept to its logical conclusion .... it's not just files, it's anything. calling it an editor is entirely descriptive. it's just that other "editors" are far more limited in that they only edit file buffers.

This is what alienates me when I try to use VSCode every year or two. It has a wonderful extension ecosystem and seems generally quite competent, but there’s no culture of just putting stuff in a text buffer like every other thing. Extensions want their own special windows with different key bindings, the terminal is its own thing, there’s custom UI everywhere. Emacs is just how I think for the most part - here is some text I can freely navigate around and mess with. Sometimes new text is inserted or appended by me or a command, but I’m never having to switch modes in my head.

IMO emacs is best thought of a general-purpose programming environment specialized for creating custom IDEs.

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