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A comment on Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packages, and a Full Refactor. Parent comment

Re:Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packag... by Barrin92 on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @03:27AM (#47320082)
>Is there some reason Lisp is superior to any other general-purpose programming language for text editing?

purely for text editing? No. But that's not what distinguishes Emacs, it's famously very mediocre at it. The point of Emacs is to be a fully transparent, inspectable, dynamic and changeable environment. In spirit similar to Smalltalk systems like Pharo. And for that a Lisp is not the only choice but a very good one.

There's very few languages and environments that facilitate jumping into any place, making a change, compiling or evaluating a block of code or treating it as data and continuing seamlessly.

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Re:Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packag... by NetMageSCW on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @10:52AM (#47324082)
An editor environment based on Smalltalk would be very interesting.
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Re:Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packag... by klibertp on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @04:48PM (#47328614)
See GToolkit[1] - Lepiter is a bit like that. It's too notebook-y for my taste, but it lets you write and format text and embed any widget. It also uses a native GUI and is not a repackaged browser.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

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Re:Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packag... by jdougan on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @11:11PM (#47331356)
Did they do anything to fix the OpenSmalltalk VM lamentable keyboard input?
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Re:Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packag... by antiframe on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @10:29PM (#47331173)
> But that's not what distinguishes Emacs, it's famously very mediocre at it.

I disagree. Every time I use another editor I lament missing features when it comes to editing text. Like most editors (vim excluded) have pretty lackluster undo, transpose, case altering, and text reflowing commands.

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