How I use my terminal

The point isn't really the lack of graphics, it's more about the use of a keyboard and text as a universal data format.

Graphical programs look nice but are a nightmare for interoperability.

Having said that, as an Emacs user I'm surprised that anyone goes to this much effort to not use Emacs. This is what it's made for and it's all built in the most hacker-friendly way imaginable.

Easily solved with scripting languages and REPL environments.

No need to experience like MS-DOS, CP/M, VMS and UNIX without X, is all that we can get hold of.

It's difficult to express how amazing Emacs is to someone that hasn't used it long enough to really learn it. I used vi for 20 years before switching, and I'll never go back, but the me then just didn't realize what Emacs could do for me.

Yeah, I've given up trying to be evangelical about Emacs. It makes me think of the red pill in the Matrix: noone can be told what Emacs is, you have to see it for yourself. People who want to take the pill will find someone like me to help them, but it has to start with them, not me.

Back in '05 I realised how crazy it was that everyone was using these shitty editors built in to bloated IDEs, all slightly different from each other. It's all just text! This caused me to discover vim and Emacs. This was about 10 years before editors like Atom and then VS Code caught on.

I tried vim for a while, did the tutorials and tried to believe that if I practised the keys I'd become a wizard. But it never paid off. But I'm glad I learnt to enter insertion mode and exit vi/m at least.

Emacs was not presented as well back then. It had (has?) a terrible looking GUI by default. But once I'd switched that off the keyboard interface and major/minor modes made so much sense. No surprise that VS Code uses the same model.

But then when I got into Elisp I can say I truly fell in love. I liked GNU/Linux before, but Emacs is what Free Software was always meant to be. Not just technically hackable but practically so. How many people edit their VS Code plugins to do exactly what they want? With Emacs you can hack everything right there in Emacs while it's running and then just go right back to where you were.

Now extrapolate the experience to a complete operating system, instead of only the editor.

This is what systems like those from Xerox PARC, TI, Genera, ETHZ, Inferno had to offer, and we aren't still quite there in mainstream systems.

What languages are these systems based around? Maybe Lisp has something to do with it? I've been drawn to things like Guix and stumpwm for this reason. It would be a dream to have an entire OS built on a Lisp.

I keep checking in on Mezzano, a Lisp-based OS. It only runs in a VM right now, but someday... who knows?

Smalltalk, Lisp, Cedar, Oberon, Limbo.