Emacs-ng: Emacs with Deno runtime and TypeScript

I like emacs, and I'm not a lisp wizard, but it's an amazing editor and sure it has problems (long lines can grind you, although I've never halted emacs even with gb single line files - I did have to kill buffers though, and there's probably other things, on the other hand, I did grind plenty of other editors with much less) but...

> Emacs also calls "files" "buffers", and calls "windows" "frames" and "frames" "windows"

Well, as someone pointed out, buffers are buffers, files are files, why would your editor try to fool you regarding the fact that what you have in front of you is in a buffer (that might be persisted into a file) and not exactly a file? Every buffer tells you if it's pointing to some file...

Frames aren't windows. Like tabs in a browser aren't browsers or windows either?

> It has weird keyboard shortcuts.

Yeah, the worse part of it all is you can't even change them, right?

> Oh, but if you press another key in between, you get lost in clipboard madness.

Yeap sometimes that happens, on the other hand the times it doesn't and you can cycle through things in ways that are not easy to do in other editors is great.

> Emacs also has an "undo", but no "redo" command

This ties back to the ring design? You can switch the direction you're going with two key-strokes. Granted, if you change the buffer (outside of just navigating the ring or copying into buffer, save, etc) then it does get weird, but it's usually pretty consistent and useful. It's like having a step by step git to your inputs into the buffer.

But `this`, this, this: > I agree that using a JS runtime makes more sense that Emacs's weird e-lisp runtime, with all of its dynamic-scope weirdness.

If the JS runtime, with the million of hours and $ poured into it to make it performant at the runtime engine, libraries and general language improvement, when compared to others created decades ago (and mostly voluntarily kept) didn't have an edge in some things, it would probably be the biggest facepalm in programming history ever.

Having said all this, I'm happy people keep experimenting and building stuff for others to use, even if in JS, or Rust, or Zig, or brainfuck.

I will add to this, that I also have no reason to forbid something like this. It is scratching an itch for those involved. Kudos on that, and best of luck with it. I just can't pretend this is solving a problem I have. :D

> Meet. Your. Users. Where. They. Are.

I think you're missing the point. Emacs is an editor that is tied to programmers, where most of its users are programmers. It's not a general purpose text editor.

And while MacOS as an operating system for general purpose usage has done incredibly well due to its intuitive design first approach when it comes to developers many have pointed "your users" have pointed out that its interface and philosophy is restricting.

> It doesn't matter. When people talk of editing documents in Word, they speak of opening a file, not a buffer.

But nothing in emacs says you can't open a file. Just that the contents once it's opened are in a buffer. But if you open files outside of emacs they'll be opened as independent windows. By the same token we shouldn't be able to have a window split in frames, because Word opens each file in a window? The naming is a necessity for disambiguation.

And in fact, the idea of what you have open is a file does introduce problems. How many people you know *ucked up because they didn't save changes? They afterwards learned the hard way what is a buffer that every program uses (even in photoshop, or other software) but didn't learn it's name, just that you should save it every N minutes...

> Meet. Your. Users. Where. They. Are.

But who are your users?

I started using emacs back in the 1990s, when I was in high school; I actually started using it under OS/2 (as part of EMX), later switched to running it under Linux. I never had trouble with the concept or name "buffers". I just read the manual and the manual explains everything very clearly. (I really loved the GNU Emacs manual, it was a pleasure to read.) In more recent years, I've abandoned emacs completely for vim, but vim calls them buffers too. I am totally at home with a text editor with "buffers", and changing the name isn't going to make anything less confusing for me – if anything, the change is going to confuse me.

Tools like emacs and vim are not targeted at "ordinary" users. If a tool isn't aimed at "ordinary" users, it shouldn't be judged for not meeting their needs, since it was never trying to.

I even wrote a text editor myself (half-finished personal project, I've never released it publicly, don't know if I ever will, it was really just to prove to myself I could do it). And it has "buffers" too, because that is the concept and terminology I am comfortable with.

I'm not sure. Guile-Emacs has been talked about for ages but never materialized. Scheme is nice and all from a language purity sense, but emacs lisp just feels so very practical for its use case.