1. a full-fledged programming language
2. no namespacing (nothing is private)
3. no modern GUI concepts to take into account (no CSS `flex-direction`...)
4. no edit-compile-run cycle
5. people have written extensions for many decades
6. people always write extensions with the possibility in mind that their extensions may be extended
Then you can probably see how it works, with just your imagination!
Of course there's a number of epiphanies that may be needed... Like how the principle "compose many small Unix programs with text as the universal interface" is just like "compose many functions with return values as the universal interface", or that it isn't an editor and more like a terminal (with integrated tmux-like functionality) that you decided to turn into an editor, or that an editor waiting for text entry is just stuck in a `while`-loop of reading the next input character, what even is a shell, what even is a computer, etc etc.
and all it took was a deep understanding of software development, experience with lisp and a bunch of your own time coding and debugging! what a piece of software!
but why would they? what problems are they solving by being able to paste text into your web browsers address bar? or load a pdf into an LLM? or some other incredibly specific-to-you ability youve added?
if simply adding a lisp interpreter to a program is enough to impress people, why not add it to something other than 1970s terminal text editor? surely an LLM plus lisp can do more of these inane tricks than a 70s text editor plus lisp?
programmatic text manipulation
You're saying this with derision, but the ability to quickly add "incredibly specific-to-you" features is precisely what is so cool about it!
For me, it's about making a repeated workflow efficient. Sure, I could alt+tab over to my PDF viewer, figure out the range of pages I want, then switch to my terminal window, run qpdf with the right arguments to split the PDF into chunks, alt+tab over to my web browser, log into Google's AI studio, mouse over add context to the LLM, navigate a file-open dialog to find my PDF, paste in my OCR prompt, have Gemini spit out my text, press download, navigate another file-open dialog, and then open the resulting file in my editor of choice.
Instead I can open my PDF, press a few keys, and have the whole process done for me without having to think too much about it and get back to wondering if this damn verb should be in the continual/habitual, completed, or more than completed past.
> why not add it to something other than 1970s terminal text editor?
We're responding to an article entitled "The terminal of the future", and even the GUI version of Emacs is still very much rooted in the paradigm of the terminal but with some very nice improvements. I'm arguing that much of the future this article pines for is already here.
I open a poorly aligned, pixelated PDF scan of a 100+ year old Latin textbook in Emacs, mark a start page, end page, and Emacs lisp code shells out to qpdf to create a new smaller pdf from my page range to /tmp, and then adds the resulting PDF to my LLM context. Then my code calls gptel-request with a custom prompt and I get an async elisp callback with the OCR'd PDF now in Emacs' org-mode format, complete with italics, bold, nicely formatted tables, and with all the right macrons over the vowels, which I toss into a scratch buffer. Now that the chapter from my textbook in a markup format, I can select a word, immediately pop up a Latin-to-English dictionary entry or select a whole sentence to hand to an LLM to analyze with a full grammatical breakdown while I'm doing my homework exercises. This 1970s vintage text editor is also a futuristic language learning platform, it blows my mind.