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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

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197 points hpaone | 2 comments | 14 Oct 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.549s | source
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billfruit ◴[21 Oct 25 08:31 UTC] No.45653702[source]▶
While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration.

Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in.

If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.

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pjmlp ◴[21 Oct 25 12:29 UTC] No.45654984[source]▶
Define modern.

IDEs with such capabilities were already available in the 1990's.

I became an XEmacs user in the 1990's, because there was hardly anything better in UNIX systems.

Remember, Emacs still lacked many niceties only available on XEmacs, and vim was yet to be invented.

This is how old such IDE features have been available.

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1. bitwize ◴[21 Oct 25 14:51 UTC] No.45656562[source]▶
XEmacs only came about because Lucid needed a front end to their IDE, Energize, which was extremely comprehensive and could even do "edit and continue" style development of C++ on Unix but, as jwz has it, the Unix community preferred its stone-knives-and-bearskins approach with command line tools.
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2. pjmlp ◴[21 Oct 25 15:11 UTC] No.45656817[source]▶
Yeah, Solaris and NeXTSTEP were the only UNIXes that had an IDE tooling story from the vendors.

Thanks to its origin, XEmacs also had for several years many graphical capabilities, that if I am not mistaken only landed on main Emacs during the late 2000's, by then I was back into IDE land.