In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service
58 points
3 hours ago
| 4 comments
| yummymelon.com
| HN
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pjmlp
1 hour ago
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> A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel level.

Only because Lisp Machines, or variations thereof didn't took off in the mainstream.

"Symbolics Lisp Machine demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

"Emacs and Lisp"

https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/emacs-and-lisp.html

While Emacs was forked by Lucid as XEmacs to make one of the very first ideas of LSP, nowadays most features have been integrated back into Emacs

https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html

"Lucid Energize Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

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charcircuit
57 minutes ago
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Even if LISP machines took off, an editor running on them still would not be an OS. Such claims come from people who don't understand what a platform is and who can conflate any platform with an operating system. You also see these people calling web browsers operating systems. By this flawed definition you could even call things like Roblox an operating system.
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pjmlp
24 minutes ago
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"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one"

-- Dan Ingalls

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bcjdjsndon
9 minutes ago
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In the Linux world, isn't the c compiler necessary for Linux to function?
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kandros
1 hour ago
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One of the pivotal moments in my career has been when I used Emacs just enough to truly understand what "Emacs is an operating system" means, not just as a joke but as something I could believe in
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bcjdjsndon
5 minutes ago
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But you already had an operating system and you could already code... Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before? Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic

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mimo84
1 hour ago
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I have been using emacs for the past couple of years. Started because I wanted to try out org mode and stayed for the extreme flexibility it offers.
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smitty1e
1 hour ago
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I've been on spacemacs.org for a while, but since I've got a Keychron G6 Pro where I can reprogram the caps lock, I'm going to try out some hard-core init.el stylings.

Suggestions welcome.

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mimo84
48 minutes ago
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I also started on spacemacs but then I wanted to learn the basics of it and switched to writing my own configuration from scratch. What helped me the most is reading though the Mastering Emacs book by Mickey Petersen which is an amazing resource to learn the basics and beyond. Right now I'm in the process of reducing the number of external packages I use and I'm trying to use more of the built in functionality that is available "out of the box".
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smitty1e
14 minutes ago
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Nice.

I'm going to go through https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs as well as https://www.masteringemacs.org/

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driva
13 minutes ago
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It's a shell not an operating system but the concept of a shell isn't commonly understood.
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