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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

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teddyh·

Why not instead blame Windows for not having the standard tools “grep” and “find”?

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UNIX standard tools, and not every operating system is supposed to be a UNIX clone.

There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.

Feel free to add the code to use something else by default on Windows: <https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/p...>

Why should I bother, when I share James Gosling opinion regarding using Emacs on the 21st century?

https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-jav...

Given that was in 2008, I would update his remark from Netbeans, to any of JetBrains products, Eclipse or whatever.

In any case, you can get those features using Windows Resource Toolkit on the old days, a mix of findstr and other similar improvements on Windows NT linage, nowadays Powershell will be enough.

Calling Gosling "the father of Emacs" is pretty inaccurate. What Gosling did was create the first UNIX version of Emacs, and while that predates RMS' GNU Emacs, Emacs was originally a series of macros created by RMS for the TECO editor running on ITS (Emacs originally meant "editor macros"), so RMS is clearly the father of Emacs.

He’s probabaly just salty that his commercial Emacs clone for Unix (with its terrible not-quite-Lisp extension language) never took off.

The criticism makes sense when you consider that yeah, while posix tools are okay, needing them everywhere means you have something wrong in your programming ecosystem, and Elisp has many things wrong.

Emacs can easily work with non-posix tools. Many people use ag, ripgrep, or ack in lieu of grep. You change the command string Emacs uses for finding and grepping to your tool of choice.

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