Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

Emacs might actually get away with switching to CUA, it's already halfway there - you're always in "insert mode" and use Ctrl/Alt+letter for advanced operations. But rejiggering Emacs's shortcuts will alienate current users while probably not attracting many new ones. This is always a problem for a minority-use product - your users don't want to use "standard" software for whatever reason and just blindly chasing the majority will have you fall between two stools. Vi(m) probably can't be built around CUA principles. Its modal editing language is completely alien to what CUA is and while you can add a few bespoke shortcuts (I used to have ctrl+s for save), they usually stick out like a sore thumb (I switched to s because it was more natural). I would love to see someone try though, it might work out.

For the second point, I'm inclined to agree that we should be able to show information in a better way than a pure text buffer on screen. There are neovim shells built around Electron which I'm keeping an eye on, because those should allow for rich GUI controls to be easily created. Though it might actually be better to adopt something like Tk in vimscript to give plugins a very simple way of showing GUI components.

Parent was very rude, but they do raise the correct point that our editors were built in a different time and we could adopt modern principles to make them better. VSCode is probably this generation's Emacs.

> Isn't Unix entirely about modularity?

No, unix goal is to provide a minimal "platform" that third party software may use as a "detached" base and interoperate via a simple, small and common IPC mechanism. Unix is essentially like a wagon to support any kind of boxes/pallets.

LispM, Alto workstations, ITS, Emacs do the opposite: the OS must not be for them a platform with a very basic set of API/IPC any software can use but a sole, single, integrated environment in witch any software live inside like a complex machine.

Unix was a success being simple because at that time using "unix-hater's OSes" was expensive, hard, to a point that you are totally tied to specific hw and you have to know many things to develop even a super-simple software. After however unix prove to be unable to evolve. Third party "giant frameworks" became a common thing, X with it libs etc is the most common example. Basic subset of functions and IPC can't compensate.

We do not develop ANYTHING serious anymore after that, Plan9 was probably the last tentative but never get completed enough...

I consider actual Emacs such as a small way to keep LispM alive, that suffer enormous limitation of not having hardware, bootloader a kernel to be a real OS however in today's tech status it offer the best way to operate on a desktop: everything is integrated through the most common things we know, text. It's status prove that idea is valid but so complex to accomplish completely that's practically failed. We simply can't sustain economically a LispMachine today.

Hope to be more clear now...

Emacs bring the idea that there is no real distinction between application, OS, data whatever, we need a completely integrated computing environment that act "uno animo" easy bent and build for anyone by anyone. This works really well, but in academia, so in a super-slowly evolving environment because the level of complexity needed to realize such idea in practice is so high that's demand decades only to create a desktop... That's why Emacs while keep evolving and even after decades it's still on the scene, it shine or better as someone say it outshine other software like the sun outshine night stars, but it suffer it's own architecture being nearly unable to really radically evolve...

I hope for a distant future with a GuixSD OS, perhaps based on Plan9 (more interest IMO than Hurd), that boot directly into Emacs instead of a shell and anything is done with Guile Scheme so I can really see and use a LispMachine in the present (future) but it's a dream I do not really think it can ever arrive...