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Toward a "modern" Emacs

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 26, 2020 11:59 UTC (Sat) by tdz (subscriber, #58733)
In reply to: Toward a "modern" Emacs by dottedmag
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

The point is: if Emacs is primarily a platform, the devs have all the options for overhauling the user interfaces. If Emacs is primarily an editor, possible changes are limited to UI style and theming.

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Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 26, 2020 15:38 UTC (Sat) by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590) [Link]

It's a lousy platform by standards of 2020. The only redeeming quality of Emacs today is a huge amount of effort that went into editor and modes. Losing backward compatibility with all this code makes Emacs-as-a-platform completely useless.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 26, 2020 16:29 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I will try to say what others have said again.

Yes, Emacs is mostly a development platform — and API for that development platform is Emacs UI.

That's the same issue Firefox developers faced and the same issue which made Chrome developers to only offer very limited extensions API: if you give developers an option to change, basically, anything in your app… then suddenly all possible changes in the app become impossible.

That's why, ultimately, what we have now, today, is not Emacs 28, but, in reality Emacs 1.28: the major part of Emacs version number was dropped years ago because you couldn't radically change anything in Emacs.

You can only extend it, not change it.


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