Taking it to Th’emacs

There are WebKit integrations in Emacs available [0]. The beauty of emacs is that it&#x27;s actually programming language kernel that has a text editor built in. You can extend Emacs far beyond text.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WebKit" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;WebKit</a>

<i>Emacs has built-in scripting language. . . . All of the editor’s functionality is exposed via APIs written in the scripting language.<p>As a consequence, you can control everything emacs does programmatically. This makes emacs extensible in a way that is far deeper and more powerful than a plug-in architecture. A plug-in architecture must anticipate every desired extension to the system. Since it never can, it always disappoints in the end. Along the way it grows ever more complex and bloated in its futile attempt to foresee every possible need. With a language, you can code any extension you need.</i><p>Does anyone who has tried to modify both Emacs and an editor (or IDE) with a plug-in architecture agree or disagree with that?

Really seems that you can take emacs back to the core by just looking at the origin of the name. Editor MACroS. Says it all right there, it isn&#x27;t just a text editor.<p>Indeed, the text editor portion is almost incidental. Emacs is a set of programs that all operate with the text editor as the common environment.<p>This works remarkably well with things that communicate through text. Which is, not unsurprisingly, a lot. Doesn&#x27;t work as well for purely visual things. Especially not those that are lacking a text representation.

Check out Light Table. It has a really interesting architecture specifically designed to support that kind of interactive scriptability &#x2F; extensibility, and the fact that it&#x27;s written in a decent Lisp (Clojure) is the icing on the cake. It&#x27;s a joy to work with, because even when the internal code has problems you can just patch it on the fly.

<i>Emacs is my preferred text editor. I don’t use old-fashioned text editors as much as I used to, because I often need more specialized tools. I use IDEs for various programming languages and other things when producing high quality documents. And yet, I often wish I could subsume these with a tool that had the basic goodness of emacs.</i><p>I love the ease of customization of Emacs and other text editors, but they&#x27;re just plain dumb when it comes to knowing programming languages.