In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service(yummymelon.com) |
In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service(yummymelon.com) |
Only because Lisp Machines, or variations thereof didn't took off in the mainstream.
"Symbolics Lisp Machine demo"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk
"Emacs and Lisp"
https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/emacs-and-lisp.html
While Emacs was forked by Lucid as XEmacs to make one of the very first ideas of LSP, nowadays most features have been integrated back into Emacs
https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html
"Lucid Energize Demo"
-- Dan Ingalls
Unfortunately, I failed to convince my employer to make everybody else switch to Emacs.
So, now I'm using lots of one-purpose tools, one for each separate task, a good deal less efficiently than I could use Emacs, and I'm still learning all the new UIs and keyboard mappings.
I have not updated my laptop (or got a new one) because I am concerned they will not allow me to install or continue to use Emacs. Honestly, I can vision how that conversation goes:-
[manager]: Hi, so what is Emacs
[me]: Emacs is a text editor I use daily and makes me efficient in my work
[manager]: OK. I would like us to start using Visual Studio Code with the new projects coming up
[me]: Why? The consumption models we are using has no VSCode support, anyway.
[manager]: It would just be good if we are all using the same tools
[me]: It should not matter what we use as long as we work with git and deployment. If someone else is great with a different text editor why force them to use something else?
[manager]: (Looks up emacs)
[manager]: I think its best we stopped using it because it is not supported by Microsoft and we need to be careful with the dangers of open source.
[me]: OK. Should we contact other IT departments to replace any open source tools they use?
[manager]: Its just emacs is not verified software for the business. I think you are complicating things a little (tries to belittle me)
[me]: Emacs is my daily driver! If it goes, I will hand in my resignation!
* Manager is not there to understand or reason.. he is just following orders from other IT departments. *
Why is that a valid point?
For example, if I'm teaching a new hire to set up their vscode it is not very helpful to tell them "now you need to activate the python venv". It is much more helpful to be able to tell them "Now we're going to activate the python venv. To do that, open your command palette and search for 'select python interpreter'".
In my personal life, I still exclusively use emacs (which I have scripted to auto-detect venvs) but I put up with using vscode at work to be a greater utility to my team.
No. That's only a valid point if something about the tool must be shared between users, rather than just the output. Emacs is a text editor. It reads, modifies, and produces text. The correct tool for each team member to use is the one they're most productive with, full stop.
Jesus fucking Shiva while Odin watches, but I hate corporate management "thinking". It's just become more and more brain-dead over the decades.
You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic
Suggestions welcome.
Where Emacs comes with all bells and whistles included in one big distribution, much like an operating system.
Norton Commander contains a text editor. Emacs operates at that level, whilst being reprogrammable.
This arguable. I personally use emacs for text editing for sure, but not only: it also does emails (notmuch), git (magit), team & project management (org), mastodon, fleet management (nix + colmena + custom elisp functions), and, more importantly, all these “applications” can mutually share data.
So can you use emacs as a text editor only? Sure. Can you leverage its intrinsic abilities to reach what might be called an automation harness? Yes as well.
A simple example: I wrote a function that let me highlight an X.509 cert in a YAML document, regardless of indentation, and pass it to 'openssl x509' to show me what it is. This has saved me lots of time over the years not having to copy/paste, fiddle with whitespace, etc. But it's only valuable because the functionality is now right at my fingertips in the environment I'm already in!
TBH that does sound pretty awesome, assuming good primitive operations were exposed through the Lisp API.
It's more correctly a Lisp execution environment with a text editor added as a bonus ;)
`M-x docter` is something I never had before.
With Unix, most programs are binary and while the shell is a good glue language, you can’t alter a program and the OS that much. With Emacs, only the core coded in C is sacred, anything else can be modified to fit your workflow. And there’s a lot of packages out there to provide you with raw materials.
I'm going to go through https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs as well as https://www.masteringemacs.org/
Because the instruction was stupid, based on marketing instead of utility, or otherwise given without any thought to how it impacts the actual day-to-day work of their subordinates.
Why WOULDN'T you disobey a stupid instruction? What's the difference between "stop using this tool you're productive in and switch to this one that you're demonstrably LESS productive in for no reason other than I heard it was a good idea", and "Go strap some rocks onto your ankles and swim the English channel. I heard that was a good idea."?
The point of the parent is that in an ideal situation, where everything works without flaw, theoretically it makes no difference which tools everyone uses. In real life, you having a homogeneous setup across a team makes the sysadmin's job a lot easier.
To run? Absolutely not.
Edit: Looking up the quote it seems to just be the person being pedantic in how they define operating systems.
What a surprise
Pragmatism beats idealism in the real world
I disagree though. While there are benefits to that approach, I feel like language innovation would be stifled to a certain degree.