Emacsy: An Embeddable Toolkit of Emacs-like Functionality

An anonymous reader writes "Emacsy is 'a Guile library that provides Emacs-like facilities — keymaps, minibuffer, tab completion, recordable macros, and major/minor modes — for applications natively.' However, to my eyes, it looks more like an attempt to revive the development style done on Symbolics Lisp Machines that survives to some extent in Emacs. Might be a boon to Emacs users, but where's a comparable VIM alternative?" The skeptic in me asks what benefit this would have over just using libguile directly, and how it fits in with efforts to port Emacs itself to Guile and things like Englightenment's pluggable event loop. The example code seems to imply Emacs-like APIs will be used (despite not intending to replace parts of Emacs), even when better alternatives exist. Some of the proposed components seem orthogonal to existing interface toolkits; others seem to compete with components provided by various Free desktop environments.

The critics can learn a thing or two about emacs

[gorrepati]

My personal feeling about emacs is it is very beautiful(yes). Let the point-and-click gui-using critics learn a thing or two about why making everything programmable(in a easy way, unlike eclipse) is an awesome idea.

Re:The critics can learn a thing or two about emac

[Darinbob]

If your editor has a menu to toggle case of letters then it must have hundreds of menu entries to have something so infrequent show up there. If you really need it you can add it to an Emacs menu easily enough.

Emacs has very compatible short cuts! It is compatible with editing that existed before PCs and Macs existed! So I'd say the Windows editors are the ones who broke compatibility! And by the way I can use my common Emacs movement keys in Firefox just fine, they work in bash, some of them even work in Outlook.
And Ctrl-Z does undo in my emacs.

The interface in Emacs is nice: it's minimal. I don't have 2/3rds of my screen wasted in IDE fluff. I can put three Emacs windows side by side.

Variable width fonts are EVIL. Never use those for programming! If you've got variable width how do you make things line up, and how do you know you haven't exceeded 80 characters? Variable width is for natural language text.

Re:The critics can learn a thing or two about emac

[phantomfive]

Another reason: keeping it at the 80 character limit allows you to open more than one source code window at a time and view them side by side.

I've found people who are opposed to the 80 character norm often do so because they are used to IDEs that take up the whole screen. If you only have one window to write code in, and that window fills up the whole screen no matter what else you do, what's the point of leaving that space blank? Might as well write longer lines.

If you have a real editor, the 80 character norm makes sense.