3 ms·

I read the whole thing and at first glance, it seems like a whole NIH list of wishes. We already have alternatives to the terminal, but the article have no ment

I read the whole thing and at first glance, it seems like a whole NIH list of wishes. We already have alternatives to the terminal, but the article have no mentions of them: - Emacs (inherited from lisp machines?). A VM which is powered by lisp. The latter make it easy to redefine function, and commands are just annotated functions. As for output, we have the buffer, which can be displayed in windows, which are arranged in a tiling manner in a frame. And you can have several frames. As the buffer in a window as the same grid like basis as the terminal emulator, we can use cli as is, including like a terminal emulator (vterm, eat, ansi-term,...). You can eschew the terminal flow and use the REPL flow instead (shell-mode, eshell,...). There's support for graphics, but not a full 2d context. - Acme: Kinda similar to emacs, but the whole thing is mostly about interactive text. Meaning any text can be a command. We also have the tiling/and stacking windows things that displays those texts. I would add Smalltalk to that, but it's more of an IDE than a full computing environment. But to extend it to the latter would still be a lower effort than what is described in the article.

jynelson 1y ago
i would describe the main idea of the post as opening up the data model of the terminal. the list of wishes are an example of things you can build once you've done that, not the primary reason that opening the data model is useful.
spudlyo 1y ago
Emacs also has Org-mode and org-babel, which can work a lot like a Jupyter notebook, and can even talk to jupyter kernels. I do a lot in Emacs, especially now that I'm comfortable with GPTel. I open a poorly aligned, pixelated PDF scan of a 100+ year old Latin textbook in Emacs, mark a start page, end page, and Emacs lisp code shells out to qpdf to create a new smaller pdf from my page range to /tmp, and then adds the resulting PDF to my LLM context. Then my code calls gptel-request with a custom prompt and I get an async elisp callback with the OCR'd PDF now in Emacs' org-mode format, complete with italics, bold, nicely formatted tables, and with all the right macrons over the vowels, which I toss into a scratch buffer. Now that the chapter from my textbook in a markup format, I can select a word, immediately pop up a Latin-to-English dictionary entry or select a whole sentence to hand to an LLM to analyze with a full grammatical breakdown while I'm doing my homework exercises. This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind.
- slickytail 1y ago
  As a non Emacs user, I would be really interested in a full writeup of how this works.
  - medstrom 1y ago
    There's kinda not much to it. It's just that you have: 1. a full-fledged programming language 2. no namespacing (nothing is private) 3. no modern GUI concepts to take into account (no CSS `flex-direction`...) 4. no edit-compile-run cycle 5. people have written extensions for many decades 6. people always write extensions with the possibility in mind that their extensions may be extended Then you can probably see how it works, with just your imagination! Of course there's a number of epiphanies that may be needed... Like how the principle "compose many small Unix programs with text as the universal interface" is just like "compose many functions with return values as the universal interface", or that it isn't an editor and more like a terminal (with integrated tmux-like functionality) that you decided to turn into an editor, or that an editor waiting for text entry is just stuck in a `while`-loop of reading the next input character, what even is a shell, what even is a computer, etc etc.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Yes, but what keystrokes and which packages are you using? Elpa versions or a fork from elsewhere?
  - spudlyo 1y ago
    I'm hoping to prepare a presentation on how I use Emacs for language learning for Emacs Conf 2026. There are a couple of talks for I'm very much looking forward to this year's conference[0] (happening in less than a month!) and specifically this talk[1] on language learning with Emacs. [0]: https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/ [1]: https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/languages/ https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/languages/
- skeezyjefferson 1y ago
  > This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind. and all it took was a deep understanding of software development, experience with lisp and a bunch of your own time coding and debugging! what a piece of software!
robot-wrangler 1y ago
> Acme: Got a link to what you meant? This is pretty hard to search for. > - Emacs One thing in common with emacs, jupyter, vscode.. these are all capable platforms but not solutions, and if you want to replace your terminal emulator by building on top of them it's doable but doesn't feel very portable. I'd challenge people that are making cool stuff to show it, and then ship it. Not a pile of config + a constellation of plugins at undeclared versions + a "simple" 12-step process that would-be adopters must copy/paste. That's platform customization, not something that feels like an application. Actually try bundling your cool hack as a docker container or a self-extracting executable of some kind so that it's low-effort reproducible.
- zrail 1y ago
  > Got a link to what you meant? This is pretty hard to search for. It's part of plan9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
- skydhash 1y ago
  > Got a link to what you meant? This is pretty hard to search for. http://acme.cat-v.org/ http://acme.cat-v.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M > *I'd challenge people that are making cool stuff to show it, and then ship it. Emacs has the following builtin and more - Org mode (with babel): Note taking and outliner, authoring, notebooks, agenda, task management, timetracking,... - Eshell: A shell in lisp, similar to fish, but all the editor commands are available like cli tools. - comint: All things REPL (sql client, python,...) - shell-command and shell-mode: The first is for ad-hoc commands, the second is derived from comint and give you the shell in an REPL environment (no TUI). - term: terminal emulator, when you really want a tui. But the support for escape sequences is limited, so you may want something like `eat` or `vterm`. - compile: all things build tools. If you have something that report errors and where those errors are located in files, then you can tie it to compile and have fast navigation to those locations. - flymake: Watch mode for the above. It lets you analyze the current file - ispell and flyspell: Spell checking - dired: file management - grep: Use the output of $grep_like_tool for navigatoin - gnus and rmail: Everything mail and newsgroup. - proced: Like top - docview: View pdf and ps files, although you can probably hack it to display more types. - tramp: Edit files from anywhere... And many more from utilities (calc, calendar) and games to low level functions (IPC, network,...) and full blown applications (debugger, MPD client). And a lot of stuff to write text and code thhings. All lisp code, with nice documentation. That's just for the built-in stuff. If not for the state of the Web, you could probably just went straight from init to Emacs.
lynx97 1y ago
Since you mention Emacs, I'd like to point to one thing that really only Emacs has, and nothing else: If you implement your "app" with Elisp, it is truly UI independant. It will work in a terminal, and with a GUI. To my knowledge, there is no such thing elsewhere. I used to write a lot of Elisp, roughly 20 years ago. And I did it all in a terminal, because this is what I can use. And users of my code could use it in their GUI environment, without even knowing that I was coming from a plain text-mode background. Again, this is very special, and IMO there is no other "platform" around which can do that.
- karthink 1y ago
  I think Neovim is more flexible -- a plugin you write for neovim can run in the terminal, in any Neovim GUI or in another application (like VSCode) that can embed Neovim.
  - lynx97 1y ago
    I tried to use Neovim several times. However, it appears to not be very friendly for my usecase, which is using it with a Braille display. A lot of Neovim UI elements only use background/foreground color to indicate highlighted positions, instead of making use of the cursor. I couldn't even use the intial plugin menu. Emacs is much better in thsi regard.

jynelson 1y ago

i would describe the main idea of the post as opening up the data model of the terminal. the list of wishes are an example of things you can build once you've done that, not the primary reason that opening the data model is useful.

spudlyo 1y ago

Emacs also has Org-mode and org-babel, which can work a lot like a Jupyter notebook, and can even talk to jupyter kernels. I do a lot in Emacs, especially now that I'm comfortable with GPTel. I open a poorly aligned, pixelated PDF scan of a 100+ year old Latin textbook in Emacs, mark a start page, end page, and Emacs lisp code shells out to qpdf to create a new smaller pdf from my page range to /tmp, and then adds the resulting PDF to my LLM context. Then my code calls gptel-request with a custom prompt and I get an async elisp callback with the OCR'd PDF now in Emacs' org-mode format, complete with italics, bold, nicely formatted tables, and with all the right macrons over the vowels, which I toss into a scratch buffer. Now that the chapter from my textbook in a markup format, I can select a word, immediately pop up a Latin-to-English dictionary entry or select a whole sentence to hand to an LLM to analyze with a full grammatical breakdown while I'm doing my homework exercises. This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind.

slickytail 1y ago
As a non Emacs user, I would be really interested in a full writeup of how this works.
- medstrom 1y ago
  There's kinda not much to it. It's just that you have: 1. a full-fledged programming language 2. no namespacing (nothing is private) 3. no modern GUI concepts to take into account (no CSS `flex-direction`...) 4. no edit-compile-run cycle 5. people have written extensions for many decades 6. people always write extensions with the possibility in mind that their extensions may be extended Then you can probably see how it works, with just your imagination! Of course there's a number of epiphanies that may be needed... Like how the principle "compose many small Unix programs with text as the universal interface" is just like "compose many functions with return values as the universal interface", or that it isn't an editor and more like a terminal (with integrated tmux-like functionality) that you decided to turn into an editor, or that an editor waiting for text entry is just stuck in a `while`-loop of reading the next input character, what even is a shell, what even is a computer, etc etc.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Yes, but what keystrokes and which packages are you using? Elpa versions or a fork from elsewhere?
- spudlyo 1y ago
  I'm hoping to prepare a presentation on how I use Emacs for language learning for Emacs Conf 2026. There are a couple of talks for I'm very much looking forward to this year's conference[0] (happening in less than a month!) and specifically this talk[1] on language learning with Emacs. [0]: https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/ [1]: https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/languages/ https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks/languages/
skeezyjefferson 1y ago
> This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind. and all it took was a deep understanding of software development, experience with lisp and a bunch of your own time coding and debugging! what a piece of software!

robot-wrangler 1y ago

> Acme: Got a link to what you meant? This is pretty hard to search for. > - Emacs One thing in common with emacs, jupyter, vscode.. these are all capable platforms but not solutions, and if you want to replace your terminal emulator by building on top of them it's doable but doesn't feel very portable. I'd challenge people that are making cool stuff to show it, and then ship it. Not a pile of config + a constellation of plugins at undeclared versions + a "simple" 12-step process that would-be adopters must copy/paste. That's platform customization, not something that feels like an application. Actually try bundling your cool hack as a docker container or a self-extracting executable of some kind so that it's low-effort reproducible.

zrail 1y ago
> Got a link to what you meant? This is pretty hard to search for. It's part of plan9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
skydhash 1y ago
> Got a link to what you meant? This is pretty hard to search for. http://acme.cat-v.org/ http://acme.cat-v.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M > *I'd challenge people that are making cool stuff to show it, and then ship it. Emacs has the following builtin and more - Org mode (with babel): Note taking and outliner, authoring, notebooks, agenda, task management, timetracking,... - Eshell: A shell in lisp, similar to fish, but all the editor commands are available like cli tools. - comint: All things REPL (sql client, python,...) - shell-command and shell-mode: The first is for ad-hoc commands, the second is derived from comint and give you the shell in an REPL environment (no TUI). - term: terminal emulator, when you really want a tui. But the support for escape sequences is limited, so you may want something like `eat` or `vterm`. - compile: all things build tools. If you have something that report errors and where those errors are located in files, then you can tie it to compile and have fast navigation to those locations. - flymake: Watch mode for the above. It lets you analyze the current file - ispell and flyspell: Spell checking - dired: file management - grep: Use the output of $grep_like_tool for navigatoin - gnus and rmail: Everything mail and newsgroup. - proced: Like top - docview: View pdf and ps files, although you can probably hack it to display more types. - tramp: Edit files from anywhere... And many more from utilities (calc, calendar) and games to low level functions (IPC, network,...) and full blown applications (debugger, MPD client). And a lot of stuff to write text and code thhings. All lisp code, with nice documentation. That's just for the built-in stuff. If not for the state of the Web, you could probably just went straight from init to Emacs.

lynx97 1y ago

Since you mention Emacs, I'd like to point to one thing that really only Emacs has, and nothing else: If you implement your "app" with Elisp, it is truly UI independant. It will work in a terminal, and with a GUI. To my knowledge, there is no such thing elsewhere. I used to write a lot of Elisp, roughly 20 years ago. And I did it all in a terminal, because this is what I can use. And users of my code could use it in their GUI environment, without even knowing that I was coming from a plain text-mode background. Again, this is very special, and IMO there is no other "platform" around which can do that.

karthink 1y ago
I think Neovim is more flexible -- a plugin you write for neovim can run in the terminal, in any Neovim GUI or in another application (like VSCode) that can embed Neovim.
- lynx97 1y ago
  I tried to use Neovim several times. However, it appears to not be very friendly for my usecase, which is using it with a Braille display. A lot of Neovim UI elements only use background/foreground color to indicate highlighted positions, instead of making use of the cursor. I couldn't even use the intial plugin menu. Emacs is much better in thsi regard.