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There are many versions and derivatives of Emacs (Torvalds famously uses another one), so my question is: what makes an editor an Emacs-clone?

Is it the usage of a Lisp? The idiosyncratic keybinds? The "everything-is-a-buffer" paradigm?

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In order to be an Emacs clone, an editor has to be extensible and customizable in an actual programming language, not necessarily Lisp, but not just keyboard macros or json configuration files.

JOVE is by definition not an Emacs clone, it's just an Erzatz Emacs, a "nonextensible imitation".

Please see my other post with the "authoritative definition" of Emacs and the RMS quotes explaining the difference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632654

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs

>A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

What is Joe's Editor then?

And what about Jed's editor?

Jed's editor is customizable and programmable, through SLANG scripts.

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