So, as an iPad owner who is wondering about emacs, this is one avenue I've considered. A second: distribute emacs as source and let people who own the develope

So, as an iPad owner who is wondering about emacs, this is one avenue I've considered. A second: distribute emacs as source and let people who own the developer kit compile and install it. Given the rather large overlap between developers and emacs users, this might not be so bad. But it may be hard to envision anyone going through the effort. I'd be very curious to see what kind of emacs-like editor could be written in Javascript. Or a hybrid, with a JS front end Ajaxing away to a back end. And, of course, there's the obvious alternative of writing something that looks and works sort of like emacs but is written in Objective-C. If indeed there is sufficient interest in a serious text editor for the iPad, the BBedit and Textmate folks would appear to be sitting pretty.