←back to thread

Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

(waxbanks.wordpress.com)
197 points hpaone | 1 comments | 14 Oct 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
frou_dh ◴[21 Oct 25 12:12 UTC] No.45654853[source]▶
To me the charming thing about Emacs is how introspective a program it is. This goes beyond all the documentation being built-in, and being able to redefine things on the fly. For instance, it's easy to define a keybinding that does "Take me to the source code of the command that's bound to the next keybinding I type". When you use that and land at a destination, it will probably be Elisp code, but in some cases will even be C code - it works either way.
replies(2): >>45657115 #>>45667121 #
1. username223 ◴[21 Oct 25 15:37 UTC] No.45657115[source]▶
That and how smooth the customization curve is, from tweaking settings, to recording keyboard macros, to writing small helper functions, to creating whole packages. Compare that to something like Eclipse or IntelliJ, where there's a huge gap between changing settings and creating plugins. It's a sweet spot between semi-configurable text editors and full-blown "living ball of mud" systems like Lisp and Smalltalk.