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Emacsy: An Embeddable Toolkit of Emacs-like Functionality

An anonymous reader writes "Emacsy is 'a Guile library that provides Emacs-like facilities — keymaps, minibuffer, tab completion, recordable macros, and major/minor modes — for applications natively.' However, to my eyes, it looks more like an attempt to revive the development style done on Symbolics Lisp Machines that survives to some extent in Emacs. Might be a boon to Emacs users, but where's a comparable VIM alternative?" The skeptic in me asks what benefit this would have over just using libguile directly, and how it fits in with efforts to port Emacs itself to Guile and things like Englightenment's pluggable event loop. The example code seems to imply Emacs-like APIs will be used (despite not intending to replace parts of Emacs), even when better alternatives exist. Some of the proposed components seem orthogonal to existing interface toolkits; others seem to compete with components provided by various Free desktop environments.

5 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Take over the world by Unknown+Lamer · · Score: 4, Funny
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    HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
  2. Re:Yet another reason to stop using emacs by david.emery · · Score: 4, Funny

    The only thing VI's good for is editing the configuration file used to make EMACS :-)

  3. Re:Yet another reason to stop using emacs by Tarlus · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...because EMACS is way too cumbersome for config file editing.

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    /* No Comment */
  4. Really, you call that "recording a macro"? by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You have no idea what REAL macro recording is. Sigh.

    Tell me exactly, how do you record a search and replace based on text you found around the result of another search?

    Or a search that gathers disparate results from multiple files and places the results in a extra comma delimited file?

    Or a macro that executes a shell command and uses the output to open a third file?

    And then how do you save the macros for later reuse and edit them?

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    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  5. Re:The critics can learn a thing or two about emac by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If your editor has a menu to toggle case of letters then it must have hundreds of menu entries to have something so infrequent show up there. If you really need it you can add it to an Emacs menu easily enough.

    Emacs has very compatible short cuts! It is compatible with editing that existed before PCs and Macs existed! So I'd say the Windows editors are the ones who broke compatibility! And by the way I can use my common Emacs movement keys in Firefox just fine, they work in bash, some of them even work in Outlook.
    And Ctrl-Z does undo in my emacs.

    The interface in Emacs is nice: it's minimal. I don't have 2/3rds of my screen wasted in IDE fluff. I can put three Emacs windows side by side.

    Variable width fonts are EVIL. Never use those for programming! If you've got variable width how do you make things line up, and how do you know you haven't exceeded 80 characters? Variable width is for natural language text.