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by warkdarrior 1215 days ago
One can write a perfectly good text editor without requiring contacts or location permission.
3 comments

Very few Emacs users need a "perfectly good text editor". This is not why anyone uses Emacs.

For me, personally, Emacs is a terminal emulator, interface to Git, MUA, file manager, organizer and planner, a gateway for configuring various aspects of the system I'm using... I even use it to run alsamixer, because it's easier for me to control sound volume this way.

Oh, and an interface to govmomi / aws-cli / az with a bunch of custom code written around those tools. Openstack pending.

And any Emacs user you ask will have a bunch of other uses... Some other things I've done / or played around in the past include: Wiki server, cooperative editing (with Rudel, probably dysfunctional by now), binary files editing (well, I still do every now and then), Web browsing, IRC (and Jabber way, way back)...

And none of those use cases require contacts or location permission.

You could argue that a general-purpose planner might, but that's not what Emacs is, nor do I believe that it supports parsing contacts in the format provided by the Android APIs.

Some people use emacs as an email client - that is probably why it may require permission to access Contacts.
Again, read the top post: it's not the Emacs' problem. It's the problem of how permissions are structured. Talk to your overlords at Google and tell them that their permissions system is bad. It's them who are guilty of making a bad permissions system, not the useful software that has to deal with the fallout of their bad design.
I am the one emacs user who uses it as a text editor and nothing else.
You know what they say: Emacs is a nice operating system, but a lousy text editor :)
Emacs, though, is a great operating system, which just sadly doesn't ship with a decent text editor. Don't worry though, you can install the eVil plugin, and get what is essentially Vim running inside of it.
> perfectly good text editor

This is a very restricted description of Emacs though.

Emacs happens to provide a text editor ;-)

For me, really finally understanding this point about Emacs was nothing short of enlightenment.