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by coldtea 4311 days ago
It's not what it can't do or how many things more Emacs can do, it's how each goes about them.

Not being tied into a BS-pseudo-Lisp runtime is an essential for me. And not having been designed with 1990 display technology in mind too.

1 comments

I still don't get it. What's wrong with using a lisp as the underlying architecture? This should be an advantage.
Not for me.

1) I don't consider Lisp great for text work.

2) I don't consider Emacs Lisp a great Lisp either.

3) Even more fundamentaly, I don't think the kind of hooks Emacs offers for extensibility, with the modes etc, are to my liking, especially in how the interoporate with the visual representation.

4) And I'd rather, personally, use Python for my plugins.

One of the problems is that it's a terrible Lisp and runtime. If it was at least a Scheme, there would be less complaining. Also, Lisps aren't popular, as you surely know.

The display technology assumes a text terminal, just like vim. There are many things you can't do with that which are easy with a proper GUI.

Actually the Lisp runtime of GNU Emacs is not terrible. It's just that there are a few better in the Lisp world. Some of the things in Emacs Lisp are there by design.

> The display technology assumes a text terminal,

GNU Emacs and Xemacs have a lot of support for non-text-terminal displays.