[iLemming]

> I don't get using emacs for non text things

What do you mean by "non-text things"? You are dealing with the computer, it's all about text and mostly text. Sure, it might be encoded and digitized, but even structured binary - is all just text. Even when you give a computer voice commands - they are just synthesized audio form of fucking text. Even with "turtles all the way down" - it's all turtles made of text.

Have you seen the gif in the blogpost? With the transient that has "Move Forward/Backward", "Increase", etc. commands? The commands that you'd have to send to the specialized app anyway - Emacs or not. In what form? Fucking text, of course.

[sexyman48]

with the computer, it's all about text.

Boy, are you going to be blown away by Pac-Man.

[iLemming]

First Pac-man was written for Zilog Z80 microprocessor in Assembly. What do you think Assembly looks like? Sequence of emojis?

[ElevenLathe]

I would call a sequence of emojis a form of text too!

[iLemming]

Everything can be reduced to text. Sure, I'm of course pushing it here with my "all digital information reduces to bits, and thus could be text", but the meaningful processing requires understanding the inherent structure and relationships within that data.

It's like arguing that "all books are just sequences of letters". That's technically true, but meaningless without understanding grammar, semantics, and context.

What I'm saying is akin to: "First step to understanding all the books starts with understanding letters..."

Anyway, emojis are of course text - even though they are stored as encodings. For example, LLMs process them exactly like any other text characters - they're tokenized, embedded, and handled through the same mechanisms as words. I should've use a different analogy to make my point clear, but you know what I meant.

[avhon1]

But how does playing pac-man make especial sense in text?

[iLemming]

Well, in the context of the discussion, you can "teach" Emacs to play Pacman. Imagine sending left/right/up/down commands to a Pac-Man emulator or whatever. The emulator itself may not "understand" these commands in pure text, accepting some digital form of them, but whatever format it accepts, it probably can be reduced to sequences of alphanumerical characters.

Similarly, when the emulator broadcasts current coordinates for pieces, or sprites of them - they still can be reduced to plain text.

As a matter of fact, if you want to play Pacman in Emacs... you can just play Pacman in Emacs: https://github.com/emacsmirror/pacmacs

[worthless-trash]

You beat me to it !

[iLemming]

I'm sorry. I'll try not doing it again :) I just caught a cold, lost sleep and overall have been feeling pretty lame. I don't typically lurk around the orange site, eagerly waiting for someone to mention Emacs.