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Emacs is an application platform, just like how the browsers are today. It has a nice way for making UIs: it's all text, parts interactive, and you can bind ke
by gkya 8y ago
Emacs is an application platform, just like how the browsers are today. It has a nice way for making UIs: it's all text, parts interactive, and you can bind keys, make hooks and thus create decent, customisable applications in it. Add to that the possibility to update code on the go and advices, and you have a very nice place to make yours completely.
I wish we had a popular OS where the main UI toolkit was similar, i.e. it provided many hooks, a universal REPL and a nice interactive debugger.
- Torwald 8y agoThe thing is such an OS would never be popular, because the vast majority of users never will be programers (again).
- cup-of-tea 8y agoThere is a window manager called stumpwm like that.
- gkya 8y agoWell that's just a fraction of what I was talking about. StumpWM is nice, but it's the window manager. But imagine an environment where, say in the web browser you could hit C-h k, find what function is bound to the key that bookmarks the current tab, and advice that function to make a backup of the bookmarks database. And that such mechanism being built in to the OS' application programming libraries, so that writing a GUI app becomes essentially reminiscent of writing an Emacs major mode. Imagine all apps on your desktop had hooks where you could attach code to be run on certain events.