Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

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> The UI could be improved, maybe, but there's a lot to be said for knowing that your editor will still exist next year. I'm frankly not confident in ST3, but I'm 100% certain that Emacs will be there.

This is misleading. In the era of JetBrains and its perpetual licensing and Steam and whatnot, it's worth pointing out that ST3 is a binary that you download and have complete access to, so of course it will be there next year.

You're probably getting at the fact that development may stop on it next year, and that's true, but the product is still pretty polished and useful now.

I also don't have your confidence that Emacs will always be there. I don't have statistics - but have contributions been increasing or decreasing in the last decade? In any case, I hope that Emacs fades away: text editing is great, but I think there's still plenty of room to advance our craft. Things like Lamdu and Eve (nee Light Table) are interesting explorations.

Emacs is actually having a bit of a renaissance - ever since package.el came out and became widely adopted, Emacs adoption seems to have increased significantly, and Emacs development is quite active these days.

And 25 is near and with xwidget support, i.e. embedding things like a Webkit instance in a buffer. I guess I will be able to "exec emacs --debug-init" in my .xsession soon.

There is EXWM, an X window manager for Emacs: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

Here are some screenshots: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/wiki/Screenshots

Actually you can - http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager....

All you need to do is to set up a couple of hotkeys for things that Emacs cannot do (yet), like (start-process "" nil "xdg-open" "http://some.flashy.javascript.website")

I'm eagerly waiting for the day I can use emacs as my window manager.

You're waiting for a day in the past: See EXWM, links in a sibling comment. With it, you can use emacs as your window manager already.

That would be awesome! Is it actually stable and/or usable?

I tried it very early and it was unstable, but I'm following its development, and it seems that it'll be stable shortly. I'm using ratpoison nowadays, though I'll switch to it when it's stable enough and emacs gets multithreading.

> it's worth pointing out that ST3 is a binary that you download and have complete access to, so of course it will be there next year

This is not "being there." Popular architectures change, as do operating systems. Unless you intend to freeze your current computing environment for posterity, a working executable means nothing.

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