9 ms·

Emacs As Operating System

91 points by fogus 13y ago

gprasanth 13y ago
Whoa anyone can edit the text? What site is this?
- hga 13y ago
  It's the original wiki! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki#History
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Yet it's quite devoid of noise.
tadfisher 13y ago
More like "Emacs as default shell", as Emacs is next to worthless without all those userspace utilities.
- walexander 13y ago
  >Emacs is next to worthless without all those userspace utilities GNU/Emacs?
- gosub 13y ago
  Emacs as default init, shell, window manager and "desktop" environment. Emacs has a reimplementation of almost all basic shell commands [1][2], in eshell. You get a unix style shell that works in windows too. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.html#Built_002dins http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.ht... [2] http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2010/12/13/complete-guide-mastering-eshell/ http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2010/12/13/complete-g...
goldfeld 13y ago
"What's more, it's about the most portable operating system ever." So browsers and ECMAScript are the new EMACS. Looks about right.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Emacs as text editor with hackable presentation and interpreter. Browsers as hypertext with hackable presentation and interpreter.
- moomin 13y ago
  It really, really, isn't. Try using emacs on windows for any length of time, see how you get on.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
Friend gave me this link once: http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.... - Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel. BTW. you can get a pretty good Emacs-as-an-OS feel with the combo of Emacs, Conkeror [0] and StumpWM [1]. They are all extremely extensible (via Emacs Lisp, JavaScript and Common Lisp, respectively) and can be even made to talk to each other. [0] - http://conkeror.org/ http://conkeror.org/ [1] - http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/ http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/
- agumonkey 13y ago
  In a similar fashion boot-to-guile : http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-02/msg00131.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-02/msg0013...
- Tcepsa 13y ago
  you can get a pretty good Emacs-as-an-OS feel with the combo of Emacs, Conkeror, and StumpWM That is the setup that I use at home, and it. is. GLORIOUS.* *YMMV
  - LukeShu 13y ago
    I did that for a while, but now use wmii instead of StumpWM.
- technomancy 13y ago
  Unfortunately as far as I can tell it's no longer possible to compile recent Emacs versions statically. Would love to be proven wrong on that point; I could have missed something due to not knowing the first thing about autotools.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > BTW. you can get a pretty good Emacs-as-an-OS feel with the combo of Emacs, Conkeror [0] and StumpWM [1]. This sort of setup is exactly what makes me, a Vim user, think I may have made a mistake by not picking up Emacs instead.
latk 13y ago
The most amazing discovery I made was a minor mode that put a battery indicator into the status line. Emacs as OS – effectively true.
VLM 13y ago
Technically these guys are all talking about emacs as a CLI not as an OS. I don't think they're calling for reimplementing the e1000e network card driver in elisp as much as commenting out a getty on /dev/ttyWhatever and replacing it with a screen/tmux connection to an emacs session or a zillion other ways.
erez 13y ago
emacs the Operating system is both the idea of the LISP machine and the situation that since it is extremely extensible, you can use it as a shell, for irc or mail, read pdf and view images, listen to music and do anything that doesn't require a modern web browser, or video player. For me that was the situation for a while, nothing but Firefox and emacs. I even used it for IM and Twitter. All I needed was for it to render the web and I could ditch anything but it.
- kjs3 13y ago
  No, it really isn't. A Lisp OS (like Genera) is about extensibility down toward bare metal, not up towards applications. As you point out, if all you want to do is live your whole computing life inside of Emacs and hacking about with Lisp, people have been doing that for years (decades) without an underlying Lisp OS. Having a Lisp OS is being able to live inside that environment and being able to say things like "I'm going to add a new queuing scheme to networking" or "I wonder what happens if I change how the GC subsystem works" and the ability to do that is in the environment, in Lisp, all the way down.
lispm 13y ago
there are all kinds of random shitty pages on c2.com. Emacs is an editor extensible in Lisp. Nothing more. Just like Autocad is a cad program extensible in Lisp. Autocad is also no Lisp OS. Just like Quicksilver is a publishing program extensible in Lisp. It's still no OS. Just like Audacity is a sound editor extensible in Lisp. Still no OS. An OS is Movitz. Written in Lisp. Runs on Intel and talks to the hardware. Talks to the graphics card. Keyboard. Network card. Please, not every shitty Lisp interpreter which can print to the screen and take user input is an operating system. Not every Lisp program which can send mail is an operating system. How do you know that some Lisp is actually an operating system? A good rule of thumb is this: Is the network stack talking to the ethernet interface written in Lisp? Is the file system and the block level interface to the disk written in Lisp? Is the routine which formats the disk written in Lisp? Is the routine which puts a file system onto a blank disk written in Lisp? If that's the case, then you have a winner. Then it looks like it is a Lisp OS.
- LukeShu 13y ago
  > Emacs is an editor extensible in Lisp. Nothing more. I disagree. > Please, not every shitty Lisp interpreter which can print to the screen and take user input is an operating system. Not every Lisp program which can send mail is an operating system. I agree with that point. Calling Emacs an OS is dubious, it certainly isn't a general purpose OS, and won't run on real hardware. But, let me make the case that Emacs is an OS. Emacs has two parts, the C part, and the Emacs Lisp part. The C part isn't just a Lisp interpreter, it is a Lisp Machine emulator. It doesn't particularly resemble any of the real Lisp machines. The TCP, Keyboard/Mouse, display support, and filesystem are done at the hardware level (the operations to work with these things are among the primitive operations provided by the hardware). Of these, the display being handled by the hardware isn't particularly uncommon, historically; the filesystem is a little stranger. The Lisp part of Emacs is the operating system that runs on that emulated hardware. It's not a particularly powerful OS, it not a multi-tasking system. It has many packages available for it (though not until recently was there a official package manager). It has reasonably powerful IPC mechanisms. It has shells, mail clients (MUAs and MSAs), web browsers, web servers and more, all written entirely in Emacs Lisp. My might say "but a lot of that is being done by the host operating system!" Sure, some of it is, but all of it is sufficiently low level. If you wanted to share the filesystem with another OS running in a VM, you might do it by sharing it as a network filesystem; this is necessary when the VM OS is not designed around running in a VM. However, because Emacs OS will always be running in the Emacs VM, we can optimize it by having the Emacs VM include processor features mapping the native OS, and have the Emacs OS be aware of them. It would be slower and more code to do that all over the network.
gavinpc 13y ago
This article was interesting: http://tkf.github.io/2013/06/04/Emacs-is-dead.html http://tkf.github.io/2013/06/04/Emacs-is-dead.html The lack of multi-threading is #1 on his list, and it seems to me for good reason. If one of my emacs buffers locks up (which can happen for any number of reasons), the whole session is hosed. Notwithstanding that, one thing I'd love to see is an FTP client mode something like FileZilla.
- math0ne 13y ago
  There is many filezilla'esk ways of accessing files over ftp and ash in emacs. Two are: Dried Sunrisecommander
- hollerith 13y ago
  >If one of my emacs buffers locks up (which can happen for any number of reasons), the whole session is hosed. I have used Emacs every non-vacation day for the last 22 years, starting with version 18 and extending through version 24, on over a dozen computers, on Linux, OS X and a proprietary Unix, in text mode and with a GUI. I think I understand Emacs internals pretty well, and I cannot imagine what you mean by "if one of my Emacs buffers locks up".
  - LukeShu 13y ago
    go-mode (at least used to) have a bug in the auto-indent code that would occasionally throw it into an infinite loop. This should only affect the buffer with the code being indented. I should be able to switch buffers, switch to another frame, and edit other code. I should be able to kill the buffer. However, I can't, as the lisp is stuck trying to parse go code that can't be parsed. Now, my Emacs session, which may include several unsaved files, my IRC sessions, and connections to remote hosts, must be killed.
    - hollerith 13y ago
      Now I see: great grandparent's "emacs buffer locks up" refers to the (multi-threaded) way he (and probably you) wish Emacs worked, not the way it actually works. Typing control-G does not get you out of the infinite loop?
davidw 13y ago
Once upon a time people made fun of Emacs for being bloated: Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping I think those people would have fainted at the thought of some of the Java IDE's these days.
- jfb 13y ago
  There was a point in time when it took longer to load a fresh copy of the project I was working on in IntelliJ than it did to update, build from source, and launch Emacs. That said more about the project I was working on than IntelliJ, but still.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  It wasn't that long ago. Those guys are probably still around.
- bitwize 13y ago
  To be fair, Emacs still doesn't have anything quite like the extensive support for things like refactoring that Eclipse does. Not without bulky kluges like CEDET, anyway.
  - fhd2 13y ago
    Well, you can turn Emacs into an IDE, but then you have an IDE, which seems to inevitably include slowness and bloatedness. That's what CEDET is, basically, I couldn't bear using it. I don't find it hard to live without auto completion and friendly refactoring wizards. regex replace and grep/sed do the job for me. I might be wasting a bunch of seconds here and there, but I'm quite sure I'm saving more than that in loading/hanging time.
    - davidw 13y ago
      The major difference seems to be that those Java IDE's hook directly into the compiler, so they "know about" the language's syntax and libraries in a way that Emacs likely never will. That's a nice thing in some ways, but my guess is that when you try and edit, say, Erlang or something else, those big IDE's are just going to sputter and flail because they're outside their comfort zone. Emacs is more of a rugged jeep in that, ok, it doesn't know all the methods for all the classes in Java, but throw some Erlang, Tcl, Ruby, ASM, or whatever else at it, and it'll handle it ok, just as it does a decent job for Java, C, Perl or whatever else.
konceptz 13y ago
Forgive me for this but... Now if only Emacs as an OS had a good editor.
- DennisP 13y ago
  evil-mode
tytso 13y ago
The main reason why emacs can't be an operating system (or at least a decent one) is that it doesn't support multi-threading. And even if you added multi-threading to emacs, the fact that all of the elisp code out there has no locking and doesn't expect other threads to be modifying various data structures and buffers out from under them, means that it really can't be done at all in any kind of practical way.
- LukeShu 13y ago
  No multi-tasking doesn't mean it can't be an OS, just not a decent OS. DOS was not a multi-tasking OS. Prior to ITS, the MIT AI Lab (which RMS was a member of) were opposed to multi-tasking OSs. Lack of that feature doesn't make it not an OS.
samograd 13y ago
Now that we've learned from 'Emacs as Operating System', how about we move into the future. As the saying goes, "Emacs is a great OS but it's got a crappy text editor". "Firefox/Chrome is a great OS but it's got a really crappy text editor that has about as much power as Notepad(TM)" How about we figure out how to embed a real text editor into the edit fields of web pages?[1] Oh, and if it only worked under Linux, I don't see a problem with that. [1] http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/An-Emacs-plug-in-for-a-browser-Firefox-td191685.html http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/An-Emacs-plug-in-for-a-br...
- kaonashi 13y ago
  That's kind of the direction Lighttable seems to be going. The entire editor runs inside node-webkit, so you can have a browser window running inside your editor.
  - samograd 13y ago
    No, I want a real editor inside my browser.
    - samograd 13y ago
      Firemacs is decent, but still has a few hangups: https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/Firemacs It's the closest thing to a real editor on the I've been able to find.
    - kaonashi 13y ago
      Node-webkit is a browser.
toolslive 13y ago
The SELF guys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29 had the same dream, but used a different strategy. They wanted to replace underlying components by a rewrite in SELF, one component at a time. Until the only thing left was a SELF system.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  I think the SqueakVM was developped in the same way. Can't remember where I read this. </remembering in progress>
fspeech 13y ago
I think the Emacs as OS feeling particularly rings true for those using Windows. It certainly makes Windows a lot more usable for me. With dynamic languages the ability to run REPL inside an editor is also a huge plus. In Emacs the way you can interact with text is pretty much unlimited. For example, with the right modes you can pretty much free form evaluate any expression anywhere in the editor. One has to use it to experience the power.
jms 13y ago
Emacs is used as an operating system (interface), by blind users! Emacspeak adds speech syntheses and more to Emacs, and can do better than traditional screen readers in many ways due to being able to easily access the underlying lisp states easily. My father has difficulty seeing, and spends most of his computer time within Emacs, occasionally switching to Gnome (for certain websites) or a speech enabled console.
wprl 13y ago
I miss emacs more than I like Sublime Text… never really liked it as an OS though (bash is better).
ableal 13y ago
This made more sense in the days when 80 column by 25 lines were all that one could see into a computer, and BSD Unix shells had no sensible response to arrow keys ... In those days, having three or four Emacs buffers where one could have a couple of files being edited, a shell session, and the output of the compiler was considered a blessing. The rest of the "OS" moniker referred to things such as email and NNTP clients written in Elisp. It was really possible to start the day in Emacs and never leave, and I saw some people do it, although it was never quite my cup of tea. Fortunately, megapixel displays and window systems soon came to the rescue.
kjs3 13y ago
Those of us who actually used Genera on a Symbolics Lisp Machine really, really hope that anyone who contemplates this sets their sights a helluva lot higher than GNU Emacs. All of this mythologizing GNU Emacs as something more than a pale imitation created on hardware with a tiny fraction of the expressive power of the real thing is like watching some cargo cult culture talk about how they're going to build a real airplane out of bark and vines.
- malandrew 13y ago
  FYI: http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~weel/lispm.php http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~weel/lispm.php http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/3769989/Symbolics_Open_Genera_2.0_for_Alpha_-_complete_package_with_Lisp http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/3769989/Symbolics_Open_Genera...
  - kjs3 13y ago
    I'm waaaay ahead of you here, but thanks for putting the links up for those who aren't in the know. And before someone cranks one of these up and nit-picks some functionality GNU Emacs has that this doesn't, do try and remember that serious development of Genera for all practical purposes ended before Stallman released the first public release of GNU Emacs.
    - malandrew 13y ago
      Awesome. I'm trying to get the Open Genera on OS X now and I'm running into problems getting the ES40 emulator built and compiled for OS X. How are you running OpenGenera?
- agumonkey 13y ago
  I think many of us are waiting for a lisp os to come back. At least personally, Emacs is just the closest thing to this idea which is also runnable right now (Except buying an old lispmachine, or running the genera image floating on the web not long ago).

91 points by fogus 13y ago

gprasanth 13y ago

Whoa anyone can edit the text? What site is this?

hga 13y ago
It's the original wiki! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki#History
agumonkey 13y ago
Yet it's quite devoid of noise.

tadfisher 13y ago

More like "Emacs as default shell", as Emacs is next to worthless without all those userspace utilities.

walexander 13y ago
>Emacs is next to worthless without all those userspace utilities GNU/Emacs?
gosub 13y ago
Emacs as default init, shell, window manager and "desktop" environment. Emacs has a reimplementation of almost all basic shell commands [1][2], in eshell. You get a unix style shell that works in windows too. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.html#Built_002dins http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.ht... [2] http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2010/12/13/complete-guide-mastering-eshell/ http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2010/12/13/complete-g...

goldfeld 13y ago

"What's more, it's about the most portable operating system ever." So browsers and ECMAScript are the new EMACS. Looks about right.

agumonkey 13y ago
Emacs as text editor with hackable presentation and interpreter. Browsers as hypertext with hackable presentation and interpreter.
moomin 13y ago
It really, really, isn't. Try using emacs on windows for any length of time, see how you get on.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

Friend gave me this link once: http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.... - Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel. BTW. you can get a pretty good Emacs-as-an-OS feel with the combo of Emacs, Conkeror [0] and StumpWM [1]. They are all extremely extensible (via Emacs Lisp, JavaScript and Common Lisp, respectively) and can be even made to talk to each other. [0] - http://conkeror.org/ http://conkeror.org/ [1] - http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/ http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/

agumonkey 13y ago
In a similar fashion boot-to-guile : http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-02/msg00131.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2013-02/msg0013...
Tcepsa 13y ago
you can get a pretty good Emacs-as-an-OS feel with the combo of Emacs, Conkeror, and StumpWM That is the setup that I use at home, and it. is. GLORIOUS.* *YMMV
- LukeShu 13y ago
  I did that for a while, but now use wmii instead of StumpWM.
technomancy 13y ago
Unfortunately as far as I can tell it's no longer possible to compile recent Emacs versions statically. Would love to be proven wrong on that point; I could have missed something due to not knowing the first thing about autotools.
jlgreco 13y ago
> BTW. you can get a pretty good Emacs-as-an-OS feel with the combo of Emacs, Conkeror [0] and StumpWM [1]. This sort of setup is exactly what makes me, a Vim user, think I may have made a mistake by not picking up Emacs instead.

latk 13y ago

The most amazing discovery I made was a minor mode that put a battery indicator into the status line. Emacs as OS – effectively true.

VLM 13y ago

Technically these guys are all talking about emacs as a CLI not as an OS. I don't think they're calling for reimplementing the e1000e network card driver in elisp as much as commenting out a getty on /dev/ttyWhatever and replacing it with a screen/tmux connection to an emacs session or a zillion other ways.

erez 13y ago

emacs the Operating system is both the idea of the LISP machine and the situation that since it is extremely extensible, you can use it as a shell, for irc or mail, read pdf and view images, listen to music and do anything that doesn't require a modern web browser, or video player. For me that was the situation for a while, nothing but Firefox and emacs. I even used it for IM and Twitter. All I needed was for it to render the web and I could ditch anything but it.

kjs3 13y ago
No, it really isn't. A Lisp OS (like Genera) is about extensibility down toward bare metal, not up towards applications. As you point out, if all you want to do is live your whole computing life inside of Emacs and hacking about with Lisp, people have been doing that for years (decades) without an underlying Lisp OS. Having a Lisp OS is being able to live inside that environment and being able to say things like "I'm going to add a new queuing scheme to networking" or "I wonder what happens if I change how the GC subsystem works" and the ability to do that is in the environment, in Lisp, all the way down.

lispm 13y ago

there are all kinds of random shitty pages on c2.com. Emacs is an editor extensible in Lisp. Nothing more. Just like Autocad is a cad program extensible in Lisp. Autocad is also no Lisp OS. Just like Quicksilver is a publishing program extensible in Lisp. It's still no OS. Just like Audacity is a sound editor extensible in Lisp. Still no OS. An OS is Movitz. Written in Lisp. Runs on Intel and talks to the hardware. Talks to the graphics card. Keyboard. Network card. Please, not every shitty Lisp interpreter which can print to the screen and take user input is an operating system. Not every Lisp program which can send mail is an operating system. How do you know that some Lisp is actually an operating system? A good rule of thumb is this: Is the network stack talking to the ethernet interface written in Lisp? Is the file system and the block level interface to the disk written in Lisp? Is the routine which formats the disk written in Lisp? Is the routine which puts a file system onto a blank disk written in Lisp? If that's the case, then you have a winner. Then it looks like it is a Lisp OS.

LukeShu 13y ago
> Emacs is an editor extensible in Lisp. Nothing more. I disagree. > Please, not every shitty Lisp interpreter which can print to the screen and take user input is an operating system. Not every Lisp program which can send mail is an operating system. I agree with that point. Calling Emacs an OS is dubious, it certainly isn't a general purpose OS, and won't run on real hardware. But, let me make the case that Emacs is an OS. Emacs has two parts, the C part, and the Emacs Lisp part. The C part isn't just a Lisp interpreter, it is a Lisp Machine emulator. It doesn't particularly resemble any of the real Lisp machines. The TCP, Keyboard/Mouse, display support, and filesystem are done at the hardware level (the operations to work with these things are among the primitive operations provided by the hardware). Of these, the display being handled by the hardware isn't particularly uncommon, historically; the filesystem is a little stranger. The Lisp part of Emacs is the operating system that runs on that emulated hardware. It's not a particularly powerful OS, it not a multi-tasking system. It has many packages available for it (though not until recently was there a official package manager). It has reasonably powerful IPC mechanisms. It has shells, mail clients (MUAs and MSAs), web browsers, web servers and more, all written entirely in Emacs Lisp. My might say "but a lot of that is being done by the host operating system!" Sure, some of it is, but all of it is sufficiently low level. If you wanted to share the filesystem with another OS running in a VM, you might do it by sharing it as a network filesystem; this is necessary when the VM OS is not designed around running in a VM. However, because Emacs OS will always be running in the Emacs VM, we can optimize it by having the Emacs VM include processor features mapping the native OS, and have the Emacs OS be aware of them. It would be slower and more code to do that all over the network.

gavinpc 13y ago

This article was interesting: http://tkf.github.io/2013/06/04/Emacs-is-dead.html http://tkf.github.io/2013/06/04/Emacs-is-dead.html The lack of multi-threading is #1 on his list, and it seems to me for good reason. If one of my emacs buffers locks up (which can happen for any number of reasons), the whole session is hosed. Notwithstanding that, one thing I'd love to see is an FTP client mode something like FileZilla.

math0ne 13y ago
There is many filezilla'esk ways of accessing files over ftp and ash in emacs. Two are: Dried Sunrisecommander
hollerith 13y ago
>If one of my emacs buffers locks up (which can happen for any number of reasons), the whole session is hosed. I have used Emacs every non-vacation day for the last 22 years, starting with version 18 and extending through version 24, on over a dozen computers, on Linux, OS X and a proprietary Unix, in text mode and with a GUI. I think I understand Emacs internals pretty well, and I cannot imagine what you mean by "if one of my Emacs buffers locks up".
- LukeShu 13y ago
  go-mode (at least used to) have a bug in the auto-indent code that would occasionally throw it into an infinite loop. This should only affect the buffer with the code being indented. I should be able to switch buffers, switch to another frame, and edit other code. I should be able to kill the buffer. However, I can't, as the lisp is stuck trying to parse go code that can't be parsed. Now, my Emacs session, which may include several unsaved files, my IRC sessions, and connections to remote hosts, must be killed.
  - hollerith 13y ago
    Now I see: great grandparent's "emacs buffer locks up" refers to the (multi-threaded) way he (and probably you) wish Emacs worked, not the way it actually works. Typing control-G does not get you out of the infinite loop?

davidw 13y ago

Once upon a time people made fun of Emacs for being bloated: Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping I think those people would have fainted at the thought of some of the Java IDE's these days.

jfb 13y ago
There was a point in time when it took longer to load a fresh copy of the project I was working on in IntelliJ than it did to update, build from source, and launch Emacs. That said more about the project I was working on than IntelliJ, but still.
vinceguidry 13y ago
It wasn't that long ago. Those guys are probably still around.
bitwize 13y ago
To be fair, Emacs still doesn't have anything quite like the extensive support for things like refactoring that Eclipse does. Not without bulky kluges like CEDET, anyway.
- fhd2 13y ago
  Well, you can turn Emacs into an IDE, but then you have an IDE, which seems to inevitably include slowness and bloatedness. That's what CEDET is, basically, I couldn't bear using it. I don't find it hard to live without auto completion and friendly refactoring wizards. regex replace and grep/sed do the job for me. I might be wasting a bunch of seconds here and there, but I'm quite sure I'm saving more than that in loading/hanging time.
  - davidw 13y ago
    The major difference seems to be that those Java IDE's hook directly into the compiler, so they "know about" the language's syntax and libraries in a way that Emacs likely never will. That's a nice thing in some ways, but my guess is that when you try and edit, say, Erlang or something else, those big IDE's are just going to sputter and flail because they're outside their comfort zone. Emacs is more of a rugged jeep in that, ok, it doesn't know all the methods for all the classes in Java, but throw some Erlang, Tcl, Ruby, ASM, or whatever else at it, and it'll handle it ok, just as it does a decent job for Java, C, Perl or whatever else.

konceptz 13y ago

Forgive me for this but... Now if only Emacs as an OS had a good editor.

DennisP 13y ago
evil-mode

tytso 13y ago

The main reason why emacs can't be an operating system (or at least a decent one) is that it doesn't support multi-threading. And even if you added multi-threading to emacs, the fact that all of the elisp code out there has no locking and doesn't expect other threads to be modifying various data structures and buffers out from under them, means that it really can't be done at all in any kind of practical way.

LukeShu 13y ago
No multi-tasking doesn't mean it can't be an OS, just not a decent OS. DOS was not a multi-tasking OS. Prior to ITS, the MIT AI Lab (which RMS was a member of) were opposed to multi-tasking OSs. Lack of that feature doesn't make it not an OS.

samograd 13y ago

Now that we've learned from 'Emacs as Operating System', how about we move into the future. As the saying goes, "Emacs is a great OS but it's got a crappy text editor". "Firefox/Chrome is a great OS but it's got a really crappy text editor that has about as much power as Notepad(TM)" How about we figure out how to embed a real text editor into the edit fields of web pages?[1] Oh, and if it only worked under Linux, I don't see a problem with that. [1] http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/An-Emacs-plug-in-for-a-browser-Firefox-td191685.html http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/An-Emacs-plug-in-for-a-br...

kaonashi 13y ago
That's kind of the direction Lighttable seems to be going. The entire editor runs inside node-webkit, so you can have a browser window running inside your editor.
- samograd 13y ago
  No, I want a real editor inside my browser.
  - samograd 13y ago
    Firemacs is decent, but still has a few hangups: https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/Firemacs It's the closest thing to a real editor on the I've been able to find.
  - kaonashi 13y ago
    Node-webkit is a browser.

toolslive 13y ago

The SELF guys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29 had the same dream, but used a different strategy. They wanted to replace underlying components by a rewrite in SELF, one component at a time. Until the only thing left was a SELF system.

agumonkey 13y ago
I think the SqueakVM was developped in the same way. Can't remember where I read this. </remembering in progress>

fspeech 13y ago

I think the Emacs as OS feeling particularly rings true for those using Windows. It certainly makes Windows a lot more usable for me. With dynamic languages the ability to run REPL inside an editor is also a huge plus. In Emacs the way you can interact with text is pretty much unlimited. For example, with the right modes you can pretty much free form evaluate any expression anywhere in the editor. One has to use it to experience the power.

jms 13y ago

Emacs is used as an operating system (interface), by blind users! Emacspeak adds speech syntheses and more to Emacs, and can do better than traditional screen readers in many ways due to being able to easily access the underlying lisp states easily. My father has difficulty seeing, and spends most of his computer time within Emacs, occasionally switching to Gnome (for certain websites) or a speech enabled console.

wprl 13y ago

I miss emacs more than I like Sublime Text… never really liked it as an OS though (bash is better).

ableal 13y ago

This made more sense in the days when 80 column by 25 lines were all that one could see into a computer, and BSD Unix shells had no sensible response to arrow keys ... In those days, having three or four Emacs buffers where one could have a couple of files being edited, a shell session, and the output of the compiler was considered a blessing. The rest of the "OS" moniker referred to things such as email and NNTP clients written in Elisp. It was really possible to start the day in Emacs and never leave, and I saw some people do it, although it was never quite my cup of tea. Fortunately, megapixel displays and window systems soon came to the rescue.

kjs3 13y ago

Those of us who actually used Genera on a Symbolics Lisp Machine really, really hope that anyone who contemplates this sets their sights a helluva lot higher than GNU Emacs. All of this mythologizing GNU Emacs as something more than a pale imitation created on hardware with a tiny fraction of the expressive power of the real thing is like watching some cargo cult culture talk about how they're going to build a real airplane out of bark and vines.

malandrew 13y ago
FYI: http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~weel/lispm.php http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~weel/lispm.php http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/3769989/Symbolics_Open_Genera_2.0_for_Alpha_-_complete_package_with_Lisp http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/3769989/Symbolics_Open_Genera...
- kjs3 13y ago
  I'm waaaay ahead of you here, but thanks for putting the links up for those who aren't in the know. And before someone cranks one of these up and nit-picks some functionality GNU Emacs has that this doesn't, do try and remember that serious development of Genera for all practical purposes ended before Stallman released the first public release of GNU Emacs.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Awesome. I'm trying to get the Open Genera on OS X now and I'm running into problems getting the ES40 emulator built and compiled for OS X. How are you running OpenGenera?
agumonkey 13y ago
I think many of us are waiting for a lisp os to come back. At least personally, Emacs is just the closest thing to this idea which is also runnable right now (Except buying an old lispmachine, or running the genera image floating on the web not long ago).