
Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel (2004) - Ivoah
http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html
======
noir_lord
In concept it kinda reminds me of Oberon (I wish those had succeeded) though
the integration between the kernel and the language (elisp) isn't anything
like as tight.

For anyone who hasn't seen it (and a chance to look at the path not taken).

[https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon1992.pdf](https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon1992.pdf)

~~~
enqk
Link to the second (2013) edition:
[http://www.projectoberon.com/](http://www.projectoberon.com/)

~~~
noir_lord
Neat, I'd forgotten about that, there is also this
[http://oberonstation.x10.mx/](http://oberonstation.x10.mx/) which I keep
getting tempted by.

~~~
enqk
I thought your comparison w/ Emacs was apt.

When analysed as an interactive application Oberon makes me think the most
Acme, then Emacs. I'm struggling with defining the genuine distinctions
between operating system, application server and applications.

It seems the distinction has to do with boundaries and how they are enforced,
and by whom (I.e. the amount of user control one has on factors such as
security, isolation in contrast to the application writer)

~~~
sedachv
> When analysed as an interactive application Oberon makes me think the most
> Acme, then Emacs.

Rob Pike borrowed the UI/UX of Acme from Oberon: [http://plan9.bell-
labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html](http://plan9.bell-
labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html)

IMO the Oberon/Acme text-based command approach suffers all of the problems of
Unix shells, which are caused by lack of type information. Symbolics Genera's
Dynamic Windows used the mouse in a similar way to Oberon but with actions
guided by type information, concepts which can be found today in the Common
Lisp Interface Manager
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager)).
There are Emacs modes like SLIME that do similar things and are widely used.

------
jbicha
It's appropriate to call this at least GNU/Linux, right?

~~~
peatmoss
Yes, though I'd rather this run on OpenBSD's kernel. I'd want all two of my
softwares to span the GPL/BSD divide.

~~~
amyjess
Nah, NetBSD. Let's see how many obscure architectures can run Emacs OS!

~~~
pedrocr
Linux supports more architectures than NetBSD apparently.

------
haylem
There's also always this, which I found pretty cool and somewhat functional as
well, though it goes beyong the bare "emacs on a kernel" concept:

[http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-
manager....](http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.html)

I one had a VM at a workplace where all I had were outdated hardware specs and
outdated versions of Windows with few administrative privileges. It helped to
retain some sanity. For some time.

------
anon4711
PJB has become a bit (too little for my taste) of a persona non grata in the
common lisp world (which has a large overlap with the emacs world) ever since
it was suggested and so far not disproved (names match, nicknames match) that
he's the person behind
[https://twitter.com/ogamita](https://twitter.com/ogamita)

edit: To make it more precise, full names are identical and
[http://www.informatimago.com/index.html](http://www.informatimago.com/index.html)
links to [http://pjb.ogamita.org](http://pjb.ogamita.org) which uses the same
name (ogamita) as that twitter account.

~~~
omginternets
I dislike holocaust-deniers as much as the next guy, but I find it troubling
that one's political opinions should prevent us from considering a person's
work in a distinct domain. This is especially true in the present case: I see
no evidence that PJB has crossed the Hitler stream with the common lisp
stream.

People can be smart and respectable in one domain and stupid in another.

~~~
anon4711
A person can be smart in one domain and stupid in another, so much is clear
(think Grothendieck in maths and politics)

But a person cannot be both respectable and disrespectable at the same time, I
find, although I'm afraid now we might be disagreeing rather about words than
ideas. Respectability, to me, is a compliment to somebody's set of values.

~~~
omginternets
I agree, but the point was rather about censorship.

I find it troubling that we should censor (explicitly or otherwise) someone on
accounts of his respectability. I find this especially true when the source of
disrespectability stems from an unrelated topic.

------
wictory
Wouldn't it be better to port emacs to includeOS?

~~~
Ericson2314
includeOS + guile + guile-emacs

------
JulianMorrison
It's a nice operating system but someone needs to port a decent text editor.

~~~
cmrx64
spacemacs ;)

~~~
JulianMorrison
To clarify this gnomic reply: [http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)
it's sort of a modal emacs with live keybinding display.

~~~
cmrx64
And it integrates many "vimisms" via evil-mode. I'd been a vim user for a long
time but was increasingly dissatisfied as I got deeper into extending it. I've
found the opposite of emacs (especially with spacemacs) almost a year into the
"conversion".

One example that I've come around with was an initial extreme distaste of
dynamic binding/non-lexical scope, from a PL standpoint of writing robust
software.

But it's also _super nice_ for incremental, interactive development.

~~~
sevensor
Having tried spacemacs, I bounced back to vim. Even though vim is just a tiny
bit more responsive, it's enough to make emacs feel laggy. Granted, I use
extensions very lightly, so I'm not feeling the qualitative difference of
being able to do something in spacemacs that's impossible in vim.

~~~
johanvts
What do you mean laggy? In the response time when typing or the time to start
a new instance of emacs? If it's the first did you try emacs -q to check that
you don't have something strange in you setup. If it's the latter, did you
check out emacs --daemon ?

~~~
sevensor
I did give emacs --daemon a try, and that definitely helped with the long
startup time. I went so far as to alias vim to emacsclient -t. But what I mean
when I say it was laggy is that typing and cursor movement are ever so
slightly less responsive. Not MS Word on Windows 3.0 laggy, just enough for me
to notice the difference. I dug into it a little bit with spacemacs and vim
open side by side, and according to top, spacemacs was using about 10x the CPU
of vim.

------
Koshkin
At least today they could have used yet another kernel for this. That would
hurd more.

------
gravypod
What's that saying? Emacs is a great OS it just needs a good text editor?

------
treuss
I always thought it was the other way around ... ఠ_ఠ

------
throwanem
Why Emacs 21.3? That's ancient.

~~~
JonathonW
Because this was written in 2004 (or earlier; 2004 is the first time
archive.org crawled it).

------
dschiptsov
What, no systemd?

------
TuringTest
So it has come to this

