4 ms·

In short, it’s the antithesis of the UNIX philosophy.

• adastra22 4y ago
  I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as UNIX, is in fact, Emacs/UNIX, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Emacs plus UNIX. UNIX is not an operating environment unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Emacs system made useful by the Emacs lisp interpreter, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a editor, mail reader, and other necessary user interface components.
  • sbuk 4y ago
    Very drôle! Made a professional grump smile on a dreary Friday morning, post school run.
• yaantc 4y ago
  It's not so simple. With UNIX, the integration platform is the shell, hooking simple specialized tools through pipes and the shell language. With Emacs, the integration platform is a Lisp environment, hooking specialized Lisp tools and Unix tools through Emacs buffers (or buffers regions) using the Elisp language. So it's an extra layer, but if you look at it in this way you can see similarities: an environment that makes it easy to compose elementary functions into an integrated whole. In both cases, it's most suited for people who are ready and willing to build their own specialized environment on top of a powerful platform. Although many users don't and stick to the basics too.
• gpderetta 4y ago
  I'm not sure there is such a big divide: emacs is the OS in a way (in the same way a browser is one these days) and the tools are all the extensions (including those built in). The union of all extensions is more than the sum of all the parts. The difference is that the interface between tools in emacs is usually much richer than in UNIX (for example a buffer is a more complex abstraction than a file).