Friend gave me this link once:
<a href="http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux....</a> - Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel.<p>BTW. you can get a pretty good Emacs-as-an-OS feel with the combo of Emacs, Conkeror [0] and StumpWM [1]. They are all extremely extensible (via Emacs Lisp, JavaScript and Common Lisp, respectively) and can be even made to talk to each other.<p>[0] - <a href="http://conkeror.org/" rel="nofollow">http://conkeror.org/</a><p>[1] - <a href="http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/</a>
there are all kinds of random shitty pages on c2.com.<p>Emacs is an editor extensible in Lisp. Nothing more. Just like Autocad is a cad program extensible in Lisp. Autocad is also no Lisp OS. Just like Quicksilver is a publishing program extensible in Lisp. It's still no OS. Just like Audacity is a sound editor extensible in Lisp. Still no OS.<p>An OS is Movitz. Written in Lisp. Runs on Intel and talks to the hardware. Talks to the graphics card. Keyboard. Network card.<p>Please, not every shitty Lisp interpreter which can print to the screen and take user input is an operating system. Not every Lisp program which can send mail is an operating system.<p>How do you know that some Lisp is actually an operating system? A good rule of thumb is this: Is the network stack talking to the ethernet interface written in Lisp? Is the file system and the block level interface to the disk written in Lisp? Is the routine which formats the disk written in Lisp? Is the routine which puts a file system onto a blank disk written in Lisp? If that's the case, then you have a winner. Then it looks like it is a Lisp OS.
Technically these guys are all talking about emacs as a CLI not as an OS. I don't think they're calling for reimplementing the e1000e network card driver in elisp as much as commenting out a getty on /dev/ttyWhatever and replacing it with a screen/tmux connection to an emacs session or a zillion other ways.
Now that we've learned from 'Emacs as Operating System', how about we move into the future.<p>As the saying goes, "Emacs is a great OS but it's got a crappy text editor".<p>"Firefox/Chrome is a great OS but it's got a really crappy text editor that has about as much power as Notepad(TM)"<p>How about we figure out how to embed a real text editor into the edit fields of web pages?[1]<p>Oh, and if it only worked under Linux, I don't see a problem with that.<p>[1] <a href="http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/An-Emacs-plug-in-for-a-browser-Firefox-td191685.html" rel="nofollow">http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/An-Emacs-plug-in-for-a-br...</a>
This article was interesting:<p><a href="http://tkf.github.io/2013/06/04/Emacs-is-dead.html" rel="nofollow">http://tkf.github.io/2013/06/04/Emacs-is-dead.html</a><p>The lack of multi-threading is #1 on his list, and it seems to me for good reason. If one of my emacs buffers locks up (which can happen for any number of reasons), the whole session is hosed.<p>Notwithstanding that, one thing I'd love to see is an FTP client mode something like FileZilla.
I think the Emacs as OS feeling particularly rings true for those using Windows. It certainly makes Windows a lot more usable for me.<p>With dynamic languages the ability to run REPL inside an editor is also a huge plus. In Emacs the way you can interact with text is pretty much unlimited. For example, with the right modes you can pretty much free form evaluate any expression anywhere in the editor. One has to use it to experience the power.
The SELF guys
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29</a>
had the same dream, but used a different strategy. They wanted to replace underlying components by a rewrite in SELF, one component at a time. Until the only thing left was a SELF system.
emacs the Operating system is both the idea of the LISP machine and the situation that since it is extremely extensible, you can use it as a shell, for irc or mail, read pdf and view images, listen to music and do anything that doesn't require a modern web browser, or video player.<p>For me that was the situation for a while, nothing but Firefox and emacs. I even used it for IM and Twitter. All I needed was for it to render the web and I could ditch anything but it.
Once upon a time people made fun of Emacs for being bloated:<p>Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping<p>I think those people would have fainted at the thought of some of the Java IDE's these days.
"What's more, it's about the most portable operating system ever."<p>So browsers and ECMAScript are the new EMACS. Looks about right.
Emacs is used as an operating system (interface), by blind users! Emacspeak adds speech syntheses and more to Emacs, and can do better than traditional screen readers in many ways due to being able to easily access the underlying lisp states easily.<p>My father has difficulty seeing, and spends most of his computer time within Emacs, occasionally switching to Gnome (for certain websites) or a speech enabled console.
This made more sense in the days when 80 column by 25 lines were all that one could see into a computer, and BSD Unix shells had no sensible response to arrow keys ...<p>In those days, having three or four Emacs buffers where one could have a couple of files being edited, a shell session, and the output of the compiler was considered a blessing.<p>The rest of the "OS" moniker referred to things such as email and NNTP clients written in Elisp. It was really possible to start the day in Emacs and never leave, and I saw some people do it, although it was never quite my cup of tea. Fortunately, megapixel displays and window systems soon came to the rescue.
The main reason why emacs can't be an operating system (or at least a decent one) is that it doesn't support multi-threading. And even if you added multi-threading to emacs, the fact that all of the elisp code out there has no locking and doesn't expect other threads to be modifying various data structures and buffers out from under them, means that it really can't be done at all in any kind of practical way.
Those of us who actually used Genera on a Symbolics Lisp Machine really, really hope that anyone who contemplates this sets their sights a helluva lot higher than GNU Emacs. All of this mythologizing GNU Emacs as something more than a pale imitation created on hardware with a tiny fraction of the expressive power of the real thing is like watching some cargo cult culture talk about how they're going to build a real airplane out of bark and vines.