I think I fell in love with emacs when I realized that individual key presses could be scripted. Or possibly when I wrapped my head around macro injection. Hard to say, this thing grew on me from being an absolute space alien of an architecture to the first tool in the toolbox I reach for if I've got a new project to tackle.<p>My advice to people when editor wars come up is that going deep on something is more important than going deep on the right thing. emacs versus vi? No strong opinion. I happened to learn emacs first and would be repeating a lot of labor to go as deep on vi.<p>(... But I do tend to give a slight nudge in the direction of something of that ilk because relative to say, VS code... Those editors have already stood the test of time, they aren't beholden to one owner, and while past performance is not proof of future expectations, there's a lot of people heavily invested in keeping both of them alive and thriving).
Direct Link to "Lem" the Common Lisp based "Emacs" discussed in the talk.<p><a href="https://lem-project.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://lem-project.github.io/</a>
<a href="https://github.com/lem-project/lem">https://github.com/lem-project/lem</a>
I tried out Lem a couple times, and I was impressed, but couldn't see myself moving to it. What was impressive is how starting it up just.. worked... with LSP type stuff... I was editing Rust and that all functioned. Not as featureful as my Emacs setup, but further along than I expected. And the keybindings were mostly familiar.<p>But so many of the things I now rely on -- company mode, treemacs, vertico, etc. are not there. The value in Emacs is the huge community of things.<p>Also I had some instability each time I tried it -- buffers filling up with Common Lisp backtraces, etc.<p>Still I really want to see some advancement in this arena, because the actual <i>implementation</i> of GNU emacs leaves a lot to be desired in 2024. The packages overtop of it are nice, but the core editor blocks and pauses too much.
I really wish that Deuce [1] [2] got more attention as a source for ideas for Emacs alternatives. It sounds incredibly cool.<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221002093520/https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.dylan/c/3uuUb3Z9pAc/m/6NbE9gYpeAIJ" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20221002093520/https://groups.go...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210407151341/https://discuss.atom.io/t/the-deuce-editor-architecture/2218" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20210407151341/https://discuss.a...</a>
After reading this article this morning I went down a very fun rabbit hole today: removed my SBCL installation, installed Roswell to install SBCL again, etc.<p>The good things: editing works, slime works, access to all my Quicklisp based libraries and projects. The bad things mostly involve limited Lem functionality because I rely on many eLisp libraries like treemacs, etc.<p>I really like the speed, and having everything in Common Lisp is fun. I was using Roswell to build Lem from source, and I really liked the project’s setup, build process.
Ok, as a long-time emacs user (I think I started in 1985), I am officially nerdsniped.<p>Building the sdl2 version, there is no luck finding libSDL2_ttf, so I'll be trying the ncurses version.<p>Looks pretty snappy so far.
Two projects that may be of interest, related to this topic:<p>- Rune (<a href="https://github.com/CeleritasCelery/rune">https://github.com/CeleritasCelery/rune</a>) - A re-implementation of Emacs but in Rust (like Remacs, but actively developed)<p>- Pimacs (<a href="https://github.com/federicotdn/pimacs">https://github.com/federicotdn/pimacs</a>) - Same, but using Go (created by me, but developed in a very slow pace)
For anyone running nix/nixos, looks like there isn't a nix-shell-able package but `nix run github:dariof4/lem-flake` starts the ncurses version
I like the idea of a more modern Emacs that uses the full power of Common Lisp a lot, but I worry I'd miss a lot of features. Does Lem have org mode, a good LSP system, something like projectile, and the ability to display images and GUI buttons and such? And most importantly, does it have an evil mode with doom/spacemacs style leader key support?
Completely off topic but this website is how it should be done. No JavaScript enabled and I can play the videos and see the text and images. Well done.
It's weird to be building an Emacs clone nowadays. It's fairly clear that Vim and Emacs _both_ lost the editor wars, and VSCode has come out on top. That's not to say either Vim or Emacs are dead or will disappear, but building a clone of a niche editor is risking dooming the project to being a niche within a niche.<p>If it's just because hacking is fun, then by all means have a blast. But if the goal is to compete with Emacs, consider instead setting the target at something with far greater popularity than Emacs.