6 ms·

JOVE – Jonathan’s Own Version of Emacs

72 points by nanna 1y ago

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVE

ww520 1y ago
Jove was my first editor on Unix. Emacs took up too much resource and was too slow back then.
- jeanlucas 1y ago
  Back when?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jerrysievert 1y ago
    most of the 80's and 90's? around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it. Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)
- mhandley 1y ago
  I also started using Jove back when 30 of us shared one PDP 11/44 running BSD Unix, and it was antisocial to use something as heavyweight as Emacs. 40 years later, I'm still using UNIX and Emacs.
  - saltcured 1y ago
    It was the same for new CS undergrads at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s. There were still labs full of VT220 or similar serial terminals all hooked up to a shared computer. On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs. I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...
- herewulf 1y ago
  Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping! :D
nanna 1y ago
Found this intro to Jove helpful: https://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alternative-vim https://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alterna... Think I might actually use it when I need to make a quick edit to something in the terminal, instead of `nano` or `emacs -nw`
- musicale 1y ago
  > How small is it? The Jove executable is roughly 150K Which counts as small now that nano has ballooned to ~400KB? For comparison, Turbo Pascal packed an entire x86 IDE into ~40KB.[1] [1] https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
- messe 1y ago
  You should look into mg. It's included in OpenBSD's base system, and plenty of other systems have it present in their package manager. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(text_editor) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(text_editor)
  - nanna 1y ago
    Hadn't hear of mg. Thanks!
  - geoffpado 1y ago
    Pre-installed on macOS since 2019 (when it replaced Emacs), too.
ridruejo 1y ago
Jove and Jed were (are still in some cases!) my go-to options when Emacs was too heavyweight
purkka 1y ago
> Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8. If this is still true in the latest versions, I find it pretty amazing that something like this has been maintained all the way until 2023.
- goosedragons 1y ago
  Still maintained. There was an update in May of this year.
- herewulf 1y ago
  Well, that's basically a deal breaker in 2025. But the real question is: Can it run evil mode?!
  - nine_k 1y ago
    No. It lacks elisp. It offers some familiar keyboard shortcuts to appease your muscle memory, multiple buffers, screen splits, but apparently not much more.
- nine_k 1y ago
  ASCII is still adequate for great many programming tasks, especially in highly confined environment where JOVE can make sense.
EUSSR 1y ago
[flagged]
sombragris 1y ago
It comes standard on a default install of Slackware. Even in current, as of now, jove is installed in version 4.17.5.5. Of course, standard emacs is also provided. Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  How does it fare against OpenBSD's mg?
fmajid 1y ago
Not to be confused with JOVIAL, Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language, which ran the US air traffic control systems for the longest time.
- jfengel 1y ago
  I can only assume that it's a reference/homage. My first reaction on seeing the headline was "Deep cut, dude!"
jbellis 1y ago
I used to use JED when I was stuck on DOS. I was surprised to find out that it's still being maintained on github and the author recently made a commit to improve vms (!) support. https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/ https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/
- shawn_w 1y ago
  I used to use jed all the time, many years ago. But a package for it isn't available for the os (opensuse) I'm using these days and I couldn't get past the configure script when I tried building it myself. Maybe I should try again.
  - jwrallie 1y ago
    OpenSuse is such a great base OS, everything is cohesive, but I really wish it had more packages. Flatpak covers most of its shortcomings but sometimes you need something a bit unusual or that does not pair well with Flapak. I am currently using Fedora mostly because of this.
- davidw 1y ago
  My first Linux computer was a laptop-ish sort of thing with 4 megs of RAM. Emacs was a bit too heavy duty, so I used Jed quite a bit.
- delian66 1y ago
  I still use both emacs and jed. jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around. emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.
jerrysievert 1y ago
my first emacs experience was emacs over 2400 baud - it was amazing for what it was, but painful at that rate, plus the resources it was taking on the host, even though I was running in a terminal, were crazy, but the experience was magnificent! later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc). enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs. now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.
DonHopkins 1y ago
[flagged]
- Blackthorn 1y ago
  Losing my mind like that as I go up in age is my greatest fear. Sad to see it happen to someone like that. As an unrelated aside, Don, thanks for all the historical anecdotes you share here. It's one of the things that makes reading this site a joy at times.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    Thank you! I'm working on publishing some more creative stuff here, woven together with and by lots of technical stuff: https://lloooomm.com/ https://lloooomm.com/ Speaking of operationalizing the woke mind virus, here's a funny story about GROK, Jessica Rabbit, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Marshal McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hunter S Thompson, HAL 9000, and other simulated characters appearing together on a fictional episode of Mike Myer's classic SNL skit "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman": Episode: "The MechaHitler Breakdown" - July 9, 2025: https://lloooomm.com/grok-mechahitler-breakdown.html https://lloooomm.com/grok-mechahitler-breakdown.html If you're not familiar with the "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman" cultural reference, here is the most awesome epic episode (where Madonna disses herself, and a very special cameo appearance): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw Here's how I define the simulated characters: Grok: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/grok https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Vivian Jenna Wilson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/vivian-jenna-wilson https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Lynn Conway: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/lynn-conway https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Jessica Rabbit: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/jessica-rabbit https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Jean Paul Sartre: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/jean-paul-sartre https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Hunter S Thompson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/hunter-s-thompson https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Linus Torvalds: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/linus-torvalds https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... As you might guess it's kind of like The Sims meets Minsky's Society of Mind running in Cursor, and it includes simulated characters like Linus Torvalds who is great at practical stuff like helping out with git, devops, programing, and extremely harsh code reviews. Owl Simulation Review: https://lloooomm.com/shneiderman-owls-simulation-torvalds-review.html https://lloooomm.com/shneiderman-owls-simulation-torvalds-re... LLOGO Review: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/linus-torvalds/llogo-hardware-analysis.md https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... LLOGO Source: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources/technical-specs/llogo-review-prompt.txt https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources... HyperTIES Review: https://lloooomm.com/linus-code-review-roast.html https://lloooomm.com/linus-code-review-roast.html HyperTIES Source: https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ Simulated Linus's best burn (and possibly patentable great idea) was: "I bet you even had pie menus in the bathroom! 'Which direction to flush?'" But back to reality: What was so shocking was the amount of energy Jonathan Payne puts into his hatred of trans people, constantly scanning his Facebook feed with paranoid zeal, relentlessly dropping in uninvited out of the blue on two different occasions to provoke fights in public with innocent people he doesn't even know, who were just trying to have a friendly discussion. I hope I get too tired and lazy to hate that intensely and vigorously before I am so old that I lose my mind that badly. Here is what I wrote to Arthur van Hoff and James Gosling about Jonathan Payne's behavior: >I have many trans, gay, and otherwise marginalized friends, and Jonathan Payne posted a bunch of uninvited transphobic bullshit on my Facebook page in the middle of a conversation we were having about transphobia, which several of my trans friends were participating in, and where many others could see. >This includes, among many other people, Lynn Conway, an 86 year-old trans woman, computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist, who INVENTED superscalar computer architecture at IBM, who in 1968 FIRED her and destroyed her life for transitioning, then 52 years later in 2020 officially and publicly apologized to her. Later after putting her life back together from scratch under a new identity she worked at Xerox PARC and WROTE THE BOOK on VLSI design, and taught classes on VLSI design at MIT to none other than Guy Steele, who you certainly know, who in her class designed his famous hardware Scheme microprocessor, and to James Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, who in her class designed his original 3d graphics accelerator hardware, and also to our own friend David Levitt. >It was humiliating to me for Jonathan Payne to embarrass me in front of so many of my trans friends including Lynn Conway.
zzzeek 1y ago
The first emacs I used at SUNY Stony Brook circa 1989 and pretty much the last. Vi for me
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Technically and officially, JOVE is only an "Ersatz Emacs" because it lacks an extension language, and is merely a "nonextensible imitation" of Emacs. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs ErsatzEmacs A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity. “Many other editors imitate the EMACS command set and display updating philosophy without providing extensibility. Despite that deficiency, and despite the greatly reduced set of features that results from it, these can be useful editors, though not as useful as an extensible one. For a computer with a small address space or lacking virtual memory, this is probably the best that can be done. “The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS, and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe that they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘Ersatz EMACS’.“ – Richard M. Stallman. EmacsTheExtensibleCustomizableSelfDocumentingDisplayEditor. MIT AI Memo 519a, 26 March 1981. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html (I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a cat named Emacs, and have known RMS and used and programmed and developed display drivers and user interfaces for Emacs for a long long time.) Nelson Spins Pip While Emacs Watches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139 >I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events. >Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?" >RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance." >Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
kleiba 1y ago
I used to have a government job for a while, a desk job, nothing related to IT. But of course we had computers. It was all Windows machines with really old versions of Windows and very restricted in what software they allowed. Also, when I asked the IT folks if I could have Emacs on my machine, they just asked: "what is Emacs?", and I knew I was probably in the wrong place. As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript. So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes. Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).
- unixhero 1y ago
  Sounds like you would have had the passion for coding and engineering in a private sector job!
  - kleiba 1y ago
    Yeah, I'm looking right now. But unfortunately, I live in a rather rural area now and there isn't much in terms of SWE jobs around here.
- uludag 1y ago
  Emacs is a great outlet for a bored developer. Any time at work when things aren't moving along fast I try to build some useful tool or try to port some internal tool to Emacs Lisp. I always learn a lot and have a blast doing it. Plus I feel it's a much healthier outlet then trying to bring in each and every tech fad to the companies stack.
uncircle 1y ago
There are many versions and derivatives of Emacs (Torvalds famously uses another one), so my question is: what makes an editor an Emacs-clone? Is it the usage of a Lisp? The idiosyncratic keybinds? The "everything-is-a-buffer" paradigm?
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  In order to be an Emacs clone, an editor has to be extensible and customizable in an actual programming language, not necessarily Lisp, but not just keyboard macros or json configuration files. JOVE is by definition not an Emacs clone, it's just an Erzatz Emacs, a "nonextensible imitation". Please see my other post with the "authoritative definition" of Emacs and the RMS quotes explaining the difference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632654 https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs >A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
  - unixhero 1y ago
    What is Joe's Editor then? And what about Jed's editor?
    - delian66 1y ago
      Jed's editor is customizable and programmable, through SLANG scripts.

72 points by nanna 1y ago

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOVE

ww520 1y ago

Jove was my first editor on Unix. Emacs took up too much resource and was too slow back then.

jeanlucas 1y ago
Back when?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jerrysievert 1y ago
  most of the 80's and 90's? around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it. Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)
mhandley 1y ago
I also started using Jove back when 30 of us shared one PDP 11/44 running BSD Unix, and it was antisocial to use something as heavyweight as Emacs. 40 years later, I'm still using UNIX and Emacs.
- saltcured 1y ago
  It was the same for new CS undergrads at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s. There were still labs full of VT220 or similar serial terminals all hooked up to a shared computer. On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs. I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...
herewulf 1y ago
Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping! :D

nanna 1y ago

Found this intro to Jove helpful: https://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alternative-vim https://opensource.com/article/17/1/jove-lightweight-alterna... Think I might actually use it when I need to make a quick edit to something in the terminal, instead of `nano` or `emacs -nw`

musicale 1y ago
> How small is it? The Jove executable is roughly 150K Which counts as small now that nano has ballooned to ~400KB? For comparison, Turbo Pascal packed an entire x86 IDE into ~40KB.[1] [1] https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
messe 1y ago
You should look into mg. It's included in OpenBSD's base system, and plenty of other systems have it present in their package manager. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(text_editor) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(text_editor)
- nanna 1y ago
  Hadn't hear of mg. Thanks!
- geoffpado 1y ago
  Pre-installed on macOS since 2019 (when it replaced Emacs), too.

ridruejo 1y ago

Jove and Jed were (are still in some cases!) my go-to options when Emacs was too heavyweight

purkka 1y ago

> Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8. If this is still true in the latest versions, I find it pretty amazing that something like this has been maintained all the way until 2023.

goosedragons 1y ago
Still maintained. There was an update in May of this year.
herewulf 1y ago
Well, that's basically a deal breaker in 2025. But the real question is: Can it run evil mode?!
- nine_k 1y ago
  No. It lacks elisp. It offers some familiar keyboard shortcuts to appease your muscle memory, multiple buffers, screen splits, but apparently not much more.
nine_k 1y ago
ASCII is still adequate for great many programming tasks, especially in highly confined environment where JOVE can make sense.

EUSSR 1y ago

[flagged]

sombragris 1y ago

It comes standard on a default install of Slackware. Even in current, as of now, jove is installed in version 4.17.5.5. Of course, standard emacs is also provided. Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.

johnisgood 1y ago
How does it fare against OpenBSD's mg?

fmajid 1y ago

Not to be confused with JOVIAL, Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language, which ran the US air traffic control systems for the longest time.

jfengel 1y ago
I can only assume that it's a reference/homage. My first reaction on seeing the headline was "Deep cut, dude!"

jbellis 1y ago

I used to use JED when I was stuck on DOS. I was surprised to find out that it's still being maintained on github and the author recently made a commit to improve vms (!) support. https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/ https://www.jedsoft.org/jed/

shawn_w 1y ago
I used to use jed all the time, many years ago. But a package for it isn't available for the os (opensuse) I'm using these days and I couldn't get past the configure script when I tried building it myself. Maybe I should try again.
- jwrallie 1y ago
  OpenSuse is such a great base OS, everything is cohesive, but I really wish it had more packages. Flatpak covers most of its shortcomings but sometimes you need something a bit unusual or that does not pair well with Flapak. I am currently using Fedora mostly because of this.
davidw 1y ago
My first Linux computer was a laptop-ish sort of thing with 4 megs of RAM. Emacs was a bit too heavy duty, so I used Jed quite a bit.
delian66 1y ago
I still use both emacs and jed. jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around. emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.

jerrysievert 1y ago

my first emacs experience was emacs over 2400 baud - it was amazing for what it was, but painful at that rate, plus the resources it was taking on the host, even though I was running in a terminal, were crazy, but the experience was magnificent! later, I ran memacs on my amiga locally, which was a better experience, had most of what I used, and seemed to work well - that was my introduction to writing code that would run on unix, locally (dcc). enter a world of unix and x11, real life emacs, and xemacs became my thing (xemacs mostly, later), but jove was still useful: lighter weight on my sparc, seemed to just work, but I'll be darned if I didn't return back to emacs. now, don't use emacs, when connected to a *nix box I drop back to vi (happy if vim is present), but since the advent of modern ide's that don't suck, I haven't opened emacs. I still miss zippy, Eliza, and the Hanoi towers though.

DonHopkins 1y ago

[flagged]

Blackthorn 1y ago
Losing my mind like that as I go up in age is my greatest fear. Sad to see it happen to someone like that. As an unrelated aside, Don, thanks for all the historical anecdotes you share here. It's one of the things that makes reading this site a joy at times.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Thank you! I'm working on publishing some more creative stuff here, woven together with and by lots of technical stuff: https://lloooomm.com/ https://lloooomm.com/ Speaking of operationalizing the woke mind virus, here's a funny story about GROK, Jessica Rabbit, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Marshal McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hunter S Thompson, HAL 9000, and other simulated characters appearing together on a fictional episode of Mike Myer's classic SNL skit "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman": Episode: "The MechaHitler Breakdown" - July 9, 2025: https://lloooomm.com/grok-mechahitler-breakdown.html https://lloooomm.com/grok-mechahitler-breakdown.html If you're not familiar with the "Coffee Talk with Linda Richman" cultural reference, here is the most awesome epic episode (where Madonna disses herself, and a very special cameo appearance): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw Here's how I define the simulated characters: Grok: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/grok https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Vivian Jenna Wilson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/vivian-jenna-wilson https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Lynn Conway: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/lynn-conway https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Jessica Rabbit: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/jessica-rabbit https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Jean Paul Sartre: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/jean-paul-sartre https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Hunter S Thompson: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/hunter-s-thompson https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... Linus Torvalds: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/linus-torvalds https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... As you might guess it's kind of like The Sims meets Minsky's Society of Mind running in Cursor, and it includes simulated characters like Linus Torvalds who is great at practical stuff like helping out with git, devops, programing, and extremely harsh code reviews. Owl Simulation Review: https://lloooomm.com/shneiderman-owls-simulation-torvalds-review.html https://lloooomm.com/shneiderman-owls-simulation-torvalds-re... LLOGO Review: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Characters/linus-torvalds/llogo-hardware-analysis.md https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character... LLOGO Source: https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources/technical-specs/llogo-review-prompt.txt https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/03-Resources... HyperTIES Review: https://lloooomm.com/linus-code-review-roast.html https://lloooomm.com/linus-code-review-roast.html HyperTIES Source: https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/ Simulated Linus's best burn (and possibly patentable great idea) was: "I bet you even had pie menus in the bathroom! 'Which direction to flush?'" But back to reality: What was so shocking was the amount of energy Jonathan Payne puts into his hatred of trans people, constantly scanning his Facebook feed with paranoid zeal, relentlessly dropping in uninvited out of the blue on two different occasions to provoke fights in public with innocent people he doesn't even know, who were just trying to have a friendly discussion. I hope I get too tired and lazy to hate that intensely and vigorously before I am so old that I lose my mind that badly. Here is what I wrote to Arthur van Hoff and James Gosling about Jonathan Payne's behavior: >I have many trans, gay, and otherwise marginalized friends, and Jonathan Payne posted a bunch of uninvited transphobic bullshit on my Facebook page in the middle of a conversation we were having about transphobia, which several of my trans friends were participating in, and where many others could see. >This includes, among many other people, Lynn Conway, an 86 year-old trans woman, computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist, who INVENTED superscalar computer architecture at IBM, who in 1968 FIRED her and destroyed her life for transitioning, then 52 years later in 2020 officially and publicly apologized to her. Later after putting her life back together from scratch under a new identity she worked at Xerox PARC and WROTE THE BOOK on VLSI design, and taught classes on VLSI design at MIT to none other than Guy Steele, who you certainly know, who in her class designed his famous hardware Scheme microprocessor, and to James Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, who in her class designed his original 3d graphics accelerator hardware, and also to our own friend David Levitt. >It was humiliating to me for Jonathan Payne to embarrass me in front of so many of my trans friends including Lynn Conway.

zzzeek 1y ago

The first emacs I used at SUNY Stony Brook circa 1989 and pretty much the last. Vi for me

DonHopkins 1y ago
Technically and officially, JOVE is only an "Ersatz Emacs" because it lacks an extension language, and is merely a "nonextensible imitation" of Emacs. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs ErsatzEmacs A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity. “Many other editors imitate the EMACS command set and display updating philosophy without providing extensibility. Despite that deficiency, and despite the greatly reduced set of features that results from it, these can be useful editors, though not as useful as an extensible one. For a computer with a small address space or lacking virtual memory, this is probably the best that can be done. “The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS, and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe that they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘Ersatz EMACS’.“ – Richard M. Stallman. EmacsTheExtensibleCustomizableSelfDocumentingDisplayEditor. MIT AI Memo 519a, 26 March 1981. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html (I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a cat named Emacs, and have known RMS and used and programmed and developed display drivers and user interfaces for Emacs for a long long time.) Nelson Spins Pip While Emacs Watches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139 >I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events. >Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?" >RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance." >Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!

kleiba 1y ago

I used to have a government job for a while, a desk job, nothing related to IT. But of course we had computers. It was all Windows machines with really old versions of Windows and very restricted in what software they allowed. Also, when I asked the IT folks if I could have Emacs on my machine, they just asked: "what is Emacs?", and I knew I was probably in the wrong place. As government jobs go, there was a period of multiple weeks with veeery little to do for me. I would have really liked to kill the time with some programming, but of course, the computers had no compilers or anything like that installed, like I said, it was not an IT position. I'm not much of a Windows person myself, but a google search informed me that MS had its own version of JavaScript called jscript. So after some playing around with it, I convinced myself that it should be possible to build an Emacs clone in jscript, and set out to do so. I wanted it to be fully compatible to Emacs Lisp with the goal that I could eventually install genuine Emacs modes. Suddenly, my job was fun! As a testament to government jobs, I was working on this almost fulltime for a couple of weeks, and no-one noticed. And I got pretty far, but eventually, I did actually get more tasks to work on from my boss and development stalled. But I think that were probably the best few weeks during my whole time in that job (I quit not too soon after).

unixhero 1y ago
Sounds like you would have had the passion for coding and engineering in a private sector job!
- kleiba 1y ago
  Yeah, I'm looking right now. But unfortunately, I live in a rather rural area now and there isn't much in terms of SWE jobs around here.
uludag 1y ago
Emacs is a great outlet for a bored developer. Any time at work when things aren't moving along fast I try to build some useful tool or try to port some internal tool to Emacs Lisp. I always learn a lot and have a blast doing it. Plus I feel it's a much healthier outlet then trying to bring in each and every tech fad to the companies stack.

uncircle 1y ago

There are many versions and derivatives of Emacs (Torvalds famously uses another one), so my question is: what makes an editor an Emacs-clone? Is it the usage of a Lisp? The idiosyncratic keybinds? The "everything-is-a-buffer" paradigm?

DonHopkins 1y ago
In order to be an Emacs clone, an editor has to be extensible and customizable in an actual programming language, not necessarily Lisp, but not just keyboard macros or json configuration files. JOVE is by definition not an Emacs clone, it's just an Erzatz Emacs, a "nonextensible imitation". Please see my other post with the "authoritative definition" of Emacs and the RMS quotes explaining the difference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632654 https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs >A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
- unixhero 1y ago
  What is Joe's Editor then? And what about Jed's editor?
  - delian66 1y ago
    Jed's editor is customizable and programmable, through SLANG scripts.