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In Emacs, everything looks like a service

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Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#21

Post by ryukafalz »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #13
kandros wrote: post #5

One 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

It certainly did for me, because it let me trivially write code that integrates deeply into the rest of the system.

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!

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#22

Post by skydhash »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #13
kandros wrote: post #5

One 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

The Emacs API is kinda huge, with things like very raw network API, a very good approximation of fork/exec process management, buffers as the base communication mechanism with a lot of capabilities, various utility function with regards to interfacing with the user (windows, frame, faces, keyboard events), then the hooks and advice subsystem.

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.

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#24

Post by deng »

This just proves that you can cram pretty much anything into the client/server dichotomy if you just define "client", "server" and "request" broad enough. Similarly, I remember how desperately people tried to argue that Emacs follows the "Unix philosophy" as long as your LISP functions are doing just one thing, and do them well. I don't know what you would gain from these things. Emacs follows the idea of LISP machines, I think that much anybody can agree on. From there, Emacs can be or do pretty much whatever you want. It's excellent in communicating with CLI tools - you can call that client/server if you want, but I wouldn't know what you'd gain from that definition. The reality is that Emacs has gone through a lot of fads and hypes over its decades of existence, and each time, it has taken something along the way. Heck, there's a whole semantic parsing engine buried within (CEDET), which nowadays is pretty much unused, because then LSPs came along, and now we have agents (which Emacs btw is a pretty decent frontend for).

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#26

Post by lelanthran »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #13
kandros wrote: post #5

One 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

> Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before?

`M-x docter` is something I never had before.

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#27

Post by kleiba2 »

I've been an Emacs user for over 25 years. But last year I switched employers and they won't let me use it even for tasks where it would absolutely shine. Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point.

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.

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#28

Post by jerf »

kleiba2 wrote: post #27

I've been an Emacs user for over 25 years. But last year I switched employers and they won't let me use it even for tasks where it would absolutely shine. Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point. 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…

... how would they tell?

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#29

Post by mananaysiempre »

pjmlp wrote: post #9
charcircuit wrote: post #7

Earlier 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

As long as you don’t care about interlanguage interop, sure. The opposite point of view, that every language tries to become an operating system (and consequently to prevent other languages from coexisting), is also possible, and I’m somewhat more sympathetic to that one.

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#30

Post by shakow »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #13
kandros wrote: post #5

One 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 [a] general purpose automation harness

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.

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