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Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps adding JavaScript to the list of languages that you can extend Emacs with would be a good start - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryExtensionLanguage

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Or, emacs in the browser. Popular editors like VS Code use monaco and now github has codespaces [1] which is running in the browser.

People live as much or more in the browser as the terminal these days, so bring the emacs sauce to where the people live. Maybe you could get some of the c compiled to web assembly, and the lisp would follow? It'd be neat to open a buffer to the page emacs lives in and start editing, call JS code, or embed emacs into a page as easily as monaco. Maybe the GUI components could be made out of HTML 5?

1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/github-gets-a-built-in-ide...

PS. Rough sledding for Gitpod with this announcement.

Agree, browser-based front-ends make so much sense today - conceivably including one for emacs (which can work in the client-server mode anyway).

Would you realistically be able to bind enough emacs keybinds in a web page so that it feels natural? Or would you need some extra extension to help with that?

I'm not very familiar with how easy it is to capture browser keybinds in a web page.

You pretty much need an extension that runs in a separate window. You can already use Emacs through the Secure Shell[1] Chrome extension, but if you run it in a tab the browser eats too many key combinations for it to be useful. If you launch it in a separate window, then very few key combinations get intercepted and it works quite well.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/iodih...

So something similar to what Neovim is doing where it can be a headless backend for any editor that implements their protocol? Like eventually if JetBrains bothers, you wont need a VIM emulator for IntelliJ and co, you can just run Neovim and have it work with IntelliJ directly, without losing any of IntelliJ's benefits. Note: I also mean PyCharm, GoLand, and so on...

Neovim literally has like over 30 projects for new UIs:

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects

Emacs in the browser, you say? smug Willy Wonka face

http://www.ymacs.org/

Last updated 2012.

That’s a cool project and a nice effort. It renders pretty well on my iPhone too. Not able to edit on the phone, but still.

I see some other good ideas here too that could maybe give emacs a fresh breath in the new world of IDEs in the browser/cloud.

Emacs Lisp is a much better language than JavaScript, and that goes double for extending Emacs.

Emacs Lisp is the reason for Emacs being such a cohesive ecosystem. JavaScript would be a major mistake.

Everyone knows Javascript is bad. Millions of programmers use and know it, though.

Or Elisp in script tags in html. Can already browse pure html in eww.

I'd rather have sxml+elisp than js

For the backend or the gui-interface?

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