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In Emacs, everything looks like a service

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Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#71

Post by wtetzner »

convolvatron wrote: post #53
wtetzner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given his work on Smalltalk, I suspect he means that he prefers the line between language runtime and operating system to be erased, and they be the same thing. I disagree though. While there are benefits to that approach, I feel like language innovation would be stifled to a certain degree.

that seems backwards to me. one of the primary constraints in language development is the OS api. programs that don't interact with the world are increasingly less interesting, and you really have to work hard and be clever to change the file and its semantics, the socket, or the thread. these things have sharp edges and tend to be leaky.

> that seems backwards to me

I'm not sure I completely understand which part you find backwards. Do you mean merging language runtimes and the OS is a bad idea, or that you think merging them would lead to more innovation?

I can see an argument for both (in terms of innovation), but being able to run only one language environment on a computer at a given time would make it much harder and heavy weight to use new languages. Or at the very least, new language runtimes.

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#72

Post by scoops_ »

adrian_b wrote: post #56
jerf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you think emacs is some sort of basic text editor, I dunno, like Notepad on Windows, that has an adjoined Lisp interpreter? Admittedly, it doesn't help that there are some sibling comments that implicitly seem to be speaking that way. However, Emacs is a 42-year-old software program that has been in constant development this entire time. Its git repository has over 180,000 commits right now on its main…

Fortunately all the "weird key bindings" can be easily changed. The only difficulty is caused by the fact that already each Emacs mode may change some of the key bindings. Because of that, before deciding on some key bindings you prefer, it is wise to first check the bindings used in all the Emacs modes that you are likely to use frequently, in order to choose bindings that would not conflict with any of those modes.

There is a decent solution for this, you essentially define your own minor mode with key bindings you want to take precedence. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but seems useful in theory https://youtu.be/D99GB591Vgo

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#73

Post by ordu »

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 an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

Technically, it is just a text editor. It was created to be a text editor, so you are right, but up to a point.

Emacs is written in lisp, what it means? It means that the only part of emacs written in C is a lisp machine. And even not the whole lisp machine is written in C: there is a rudimentary read-eval-print loop (REPL), and maybe a bytecode interpreted. This REPL I believe is just to boot up purposes and is replaced with proper lisp implementation on later boot up stages. It is not lisp added to a text editor, it is a text editor added to lisp. It means, in particular, you can add to that lisp not just text editor but anything else too, like mspaint for example.

And people do just that. They write software in emacs. In particular they wrote IDE in emacs, so while emacs by itself is not an IDE, you can turn it into one.

> some general purpose automation harness

Oh, it is. It is more general than any other automation harness you know. It is a lisp machine, you can automate anything in it. Well, technically you can, in practice it can take take too much time to be practical. In practice when choosing automation harness, you'd prefer not the most general, but the most specific harness for your task.

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#77

Post by MarsIronPI »

masfoobar wrote: post #64
znpy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day when i had a windows laptop for work you could just download the windows binary distribution of emacs and run that, has something changed?

This is what I do when I use Windows. However, in recent years, I tend to use Emacs via WSL. However, I believe Microsoft Intune is used within the Business to control what software can and cannot be installed. So my guess is Windows won't allow you to install via a typical .exe I am not suggesting the above is 100% valid. I just don't want to get a new laptop and find out. Maybe I can still use Emacs via WSL... bypa…

Does Intune stop you from running any unapproved .exe's? Because IIRC Emacs can run as a "portable" executable that doesn't need to be installed in Program Files.

(I don't have any experience with Intune so pardon my ignorance.)

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#78

Post by homarp »

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 analogy is you have mspaint (or blender)

you add MCP (or an API)

suddenly with llama.cpp and a small model like qwen 3.6 35B, you can automate things by just asking.

emacs same thing, you can 'script' everything. Except no LLM needed

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#79

Post by isityettime »

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…

What about the job is so good as to make you tolerate this?

Re: In Emacs, everything looks like a service

#80

Post by MarsIronPI »

SoftTalker wrote: post #58

Emacs itself can run as a client and server. To start the server: emacs --daemon Then use `emacsclient` to connect to it. All `emacsclient` instances whether in terminals or GUI are using the same server and can access the same open files and buffers. Unfortunately it only works locally. I've tried to forward the emacs server socket over ssh to a remote client and it doesn't work.

Forwarding the socket doesn't work, but if you use X11 then you can use `ssh -X`, and the remote Emacs will open a frame on your local X server.

Do beware though that if you use the non-PGTK GTK build, closing this new frame will crash the remote Emacs.

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