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Honestly I'm a fan of good old gedit... but this makes a good case for trying emacs one more time. I haven't really understood the appeal of the single, monoli

Honestly I'm a fan of good old gedit... but this makes a good case for trying emacs one more time. I haven't really understood the appeal of the single, monolithic, do-everything editor up until this point, but looking at it from a self-modifying point of view does make it somewhat more appealing (and I need time to ingrain the key chords into muscle memory and learn some elisp). I think the exciting idea was that of a the browser-as-editor. Where is the browser that acts as an editor and has all it's plugins written in javascript (as opposed to elisp)? Of course, once we had that, the next goal would be to replace bash with it... browser as terminal ftw.

jrockway 19y ago
FWIW, Elisp is much nicer than JavaScript. It could stand to gain some features like static scoping and threading, but the "library" is so useful it's easy to ignore the linguistic flaws. I'm sure an emacs-in-JavaScript would also have a good library, but let's face it... Lisp is very enjoyable to use. There may be more JavaScript programmers than Lisp programmers... but the same could be said for PHP, and I don't think anyone wants a PHPmacs :)
- Xichekolas 19y ago
  But you said in another comment here that you are an elisp developer... of course you are going to think it's nicer. I'm not married to the javascript idea, I just suggested that because it's already used for a ton of other things in the browser, so it'd make sense to make the browser-as-editor extensible in javascript. If we really want to make it from the ground up, it'd be nice if we could replace javascript with something like Scheme[1] (or Arc ;) as the de-facto client-side scripting-language in the browser. My issue with doing it in elisp is that it's yet another special purpose language to use, and the web already requires three or four of them to get anything done as it is. I'm not scared of learning it, but if I am going to dream of pie-in-the-sky, I might as well dream of a world where one language gets things done on the web. [1] I would suggest Lisp here, but honestly I got started with Scheme, and for some reason (purely aesthetic), CL just seems so ugly to me.

jrockway 19y ago

FWIW, Elisp is much nicer than JavaScript. It could stand to gain some features like static scoping and threading, but the "library" is so useful it's easy to ignore the linguistic flaws. I'm sure an emacs-in-JavaScript would also have a good library, but let's face it... Lisp is very enjoyable to use. There may be more JavaScript programmers than Lisp programmers... but the same could be said for PHP, and I don't think anyone wants a PHPmacs :)

Xichekolas 19y ago
But you said in another comment here that you are an elisp developer... of course you are going to think it's nicer. I'm not married to the javascript idea, I just suggested that because it's already used for a ton of other things in the browser, so it'd make sense to make the browser-as-editor extensible in javascript. If we really want to make it from the ground up, it'd be nice if we could replace javascript with something like Scheme[1] (or Arc ;) as the de-facto client-side scripting-language in the browser. My issue with doing it in elisp is that it's yet another special purpose language to use, and the web already requires three or four of them to get anything done as it is. I'm not scared of learning it, but if I am going to dream of pie-in-the-sky, I might as well dream of a world where one language gets things done on the web. [1] I would suggest Lisp here, but honestly I got started with Scheme, and for some reason (purely aesthetic), CL just seems so ugly to me.