It's a shell not an operating system but the concept of a shell isn't commonly understood.
In Emacs, everything looks like a service
11–20 of 127 posts
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if LISP machines took off, an editor running on them still would not be an OS. Such claims come from people who don't understand what a platform is and who can conflate any platform with an operating system. You also see these people calling web browsers operating systems. By this flawed definition you could even call things like Roblox an operating system.
"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one" -- Dan Ingalls
In the Linux world, isn't the c compiler necessary for Linux to function?
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#13One of the pivotal moments in my career has been when I used Emacs just enough to truly understand what "Emacs is an operating system" means, not just as a joke but as something I could believe in
But you already had an operating system and you could already code... Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before? Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness
You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#14Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if LISP machines took off, an editor running on them still would not be an OS. Such claims come from people who don't understand what a platform is and who can conflate any platform with an operating system. You also see these people calling web browsers operating systems. By this flawed definition you could even call things like Roblox an operating system.
"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one" -- Dan Ingalls
Developers love building on platforms. Saying there shouldn't be platforms defies reality.
Edit: Looking up the quote it seems to just be the person being pedantic in how they define operating systems.
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#16I did not get this argument. Diagrams are nice, and I probably missed something in lisp code (not used to lisp syntax), but I see no argument that Emacs has more service-like interaction with other apps or its plugins than say vim or vscode. I agree that emacs is the most OS-like, but I would love if someone explained what exactly is the point in the article
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#17One of the pivotal moments in my career has been when I used Emacs just enough to truly understand what "Emacs is an operating system" means, not just as a joke but as something I could believe in
But you already had an operating system and you could already code... Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before? Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic
> Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness
It's more correctly a Lisp execution environment with a text editor added as a bonus ;)
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#18It's a shell not an operating system but the concept of a shell isn't commonly understood.
I see shell as an instrument through which you use other tools. In that sense, vi feels much more like a shell, because you have to use other standard unix programs with `:.!` for much functionality.
Where Emacs comes with all bells and whistles included in one big distribution, much like an operating system.
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you already had an operating system and you could already code... Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before? Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic
> Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness It's more correctly a Lisp execution environment with a text editor added as a bonus ;)
A lisp interpreter with text editing primitives.
Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service
#20Came across this recently, which I find is a good and short intro to Emacs for people who don't use it: