Okay so I made the mistake of posting about #emacs and got a dozen variations of the joke "a great operating system, lacking only a decent text editor"[1]. I just want to set the record straight on this one: Emacs is a really good text editor bolted on to the side of a pretty terrible operating system. It's a cooperatively-multitasking mess where one small bug crashes the whole thing, powered by an undulating pulp of interconnected shared state where everything is global by default
don't get me wrong, this comically slapdash approach to factoring everything — itself an inevitable consequence of GNU's pervasive "surely nobody would write a program with *bugs* in it, everything should be programmable all the time" ideological perspective — is *great fun*, you can change the behavior just about everything in hilariously dangerous ways. kind of like a web browser, but even more so.
but like if your web browser were given root access to your entire filesystem, because why not? so it's endlessly fascinating *and* super dangerous; the perfect text editor for #adhd
Aside, do you know of other interesting approaches to having an editor-like interface to shell? I know of shell buffers in emacs and of the plan9's acme's default actions, and am curious if some other models exist.