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Can you do all of those without emacs ? My point is that yes Emacs can do so many things, but 1) it's all accessible from Emacs only and 2) it uses Emacs-only c
by rakoo 6y ago
Can you do all of those without emacs ? My point is that yes Emacs can do so many things, but 1) it's all accessible from Emacs only and 2) it uses Emacs-only components. This is fine if you live inside Emacs, but it doesn't really integrate with the rest of your system
- TeMPOraL 6y agoEmacs is your system. You can't integrate all that well in the other direction, because host OS platforms don't let software interop as well. Even the Unix family. The deep interop of course comes at the expense of security. There's no sandboxing or restrictions in Emacs world. One day somebody will release a piece of elisp malware, and a lot of people - myself included - will lose their crown jewels. But until then, we get to enjoy the only remaining relatively mainstream OS with deep interoperability.
- rakoo 6y agoActually you can interop in the Unix family, that's what ACME is doing: write specific text to specific files and the content of your editor windows change. That allows the editor to implement any command you could find elsewhere, such as indent, put the contents of a directory, display compile errors...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI didn't realize that. I'll need to dig into ACME (and the history behind its ideas - I suspect there are many gems lost to time, like it is the case with Lisp machines). > write specific text to specific files Is that all plaintext, UNIX-style? Part of me wishes we could leave the era of unstructured text, and every tool carrying its own ad-hoc, bug-ridden, poorly specified parser and serialization logic - and send richly typed data structures (or objects) instead.
- BeetleB 6y agoThat's kind of like asking "Can you do all the cool things Linux provides without installing UNIX?"