[lispm]

Multics Emacs and the Lisp Machine EINE/ZWEI/ZMACS were also implemented in Lisp, they did not use an embedded scripting Lisp implementation. There is no boundary between an implementation and scriptling language, just one Lisp (Maclisp for Multics Emacs and Lisp Machine Lisp (aka ZetaLisp) for EINE/ZWEI/ZMACS), which in the case of the Lisp Machine also was used to implement the rest of the operating system and all its applications.

[kragen]

yes, and i should have said that, but gosmacs didn't copy that aspect of their design, just the ability to extend the editor in (mock) lisp

arguably gnu emacs is almost like multics emacs in this sense; the editing functionality of gnu emacs without any lisp code loaded is not actually zero but is pretty minimal. and i was surprised to find the other day that gnu emacs on my laptop is now compiling all my elisp to machine code, which is another similarity to maclisp, albeit a very recent one

[jhbadger]

For a similar situation today, there is the editor lem which is an Emacs-clone written in Common Lisp (and whose extension language is also Common Lisp).

[kragen]

also edwin, in mit scheme: https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/stable...

more generally, though, even if you aren't using a gui library with a built-in text editor widget, gigahertz and gigaflops make it not especially challenging to write a usable text editor in a high-level language. http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/edumb.py is 183 lines of fairly straightforward python and includes full-text search and infinite undo; it's not quite usable but pretty close. its really stupid buffer data structure might start to get unresponsive once you're editing a file in the neighborhood of 100k