I can’t recall who, but one of our fellow crustaceans made an offhand comment the other day that, when you use shell buffers in Emacs, it frees you from being tied to command completion/whatever in your shell itself and makes using alternative shells that much easier. The example they gave was the Tenth Edition/Plan 9 rc shell being fantastic to use in Emacs because of this.
I love rc but I never got the hang of Emacs.
Interestingly, the Amiga (I know, here I go again), put shells in “console windows”. Such windows were handled by the CON: or NEWCON: driver. There were alternative drivers available, like KingCON: that made things more like Emacs as well. I’ll have to dig up some of the documentation. It was neat.
That was a really interesting, and insightful read. I use Emacs daily, but I never thought of it as analogous to bash and sort. The article provides a compelling argument that, in fact, it is. Thanks for sharing!
The word “line” in the CLI (Command-line interface) environment indicates its one dimentional nature. For programs that potentially need to interact with (two-dimentional) text files, Emacs offers an environment with similiar characteristics that makes CLI enviornment successful: A universal text interface and a programming environment which enables infinite extensibility.
bash, which he uses as the model of the unix philosophy, is designed around composable programs to edit text files. The definition he lays out here for two dimensional is exactly what bash and its composable programs do - edit text files.
Self described as “an extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor”, GNU Emacs’s infinite extensibility is enabled by a Turing-complete language called Elisp … This is similiar to how for example Bash achieves its extensibility through Bash script.
This equally applies to vim.
one dimensional text
That’s not a thing.
The argument that Emacs is “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor” tries to paint Emacs as a monolithic swiss army knife ambitious enough to run any programs.
As a commenter on reddit pointed out, that’s a joke, not an argument.
With all that said, though, I’m presently learning emacs and enjoying it so far.
I can’t recall who, but one of our fellow crustaceans made an offhand comment the other day that, when you use shell buffers in Emacs, it frees you from being tied to command completion/whatever in your shell itself and makes using alternative shells that much easier. The example they gave was the Tenth Edition/Plan 9
rcshell being fantastic to use in Emacs because of this.I love
rcbut I never got the hang of Emacs.Interestingly, the Amiga (I know, here I go again), put shells in “console windows”. Such windows were handled by the
CON:orNEWCON:driver. There were alternative drivers available, like KingCON: that made things more like Emacs as well. I’ll have to dig up some of the documentation. It was neat.That was me because I’m a complete zealot about rc shell & emacs.
Your comment inspired me to figure out how to explain my set up better, I’m working on it.
That was a really interesting, and insightful read. I use Emacs daily, but I never thought of it as analogous to bash and sort. The article provides a compelling argument that, in fact, it is. Thanks for sharing!
I’m not overly convinced by his arguments.
bash, which he uses as the model of the unix philosophy, is designed around composable programs to edit text files. The definition he lays out here for two dimensional is exactly what bash and its composable programs do - edit text files.
This equally applies to vim.
That’s not a thing.
As a commenter on reddit pointed out, that’s a joke, not an argument.
With all that said, though, I’m presently learning emacs and enjoying it so far.