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
(I want to give credit to whoever coined this joke but Wikipedia quotes it unsourced. Not sure how to add "citation needed" but if somebody wants to do that it would be nice)
anyway I am keenly looking forward to the day when the current generation of leadership retires and leaves someone else in charge, maybe someone who has heard of like, preemptive multitasking or cutting edge technology like iOS sandboxing from 2008
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.
@glyph I was surprised by how many of the things I thought of it does.
The site claims that cloud features are "optional". Do you know what that means exactly?
@robryk warp terminal looks amazing in terms of UX but I absolutely refuse to use it on the basis that a terminal is not a thing I will ever allow to require a cloud login