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Comment by slmjkdbtl | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of a huge monolith program that you "live in", although it's contradictory to the popular philosophy "do one thing and do it well". A program that one live in is a perfect example of software as a manifest, in this case a manifest of one's personal digital lifestyle. I hope there's more people doing this, but in a more personal way, however the time and mind commitment required is huge.

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I like to think of Emacs more as a platform for a collection of Emacs lisp programs living in a shared process space.

It's not unlike what I've seen of Smalltalk (though I don't use that myself): you wouldn't necessarily think of the Smalltalk VM and image as a huge monolith program.

Emacs integrates well with Unix software that does one thing and does it well. You can even think of it as a buffering super shell with Lisp programmability, and use it to integrate and automate complicated tasks and put a usable UI on them.

I'm saying it's not because it has stuff like text editor, games even email client built-in (need confirmation never seriously used emacs), if it's only a scripting + text UI engine and offering all other apps as optional plugins then I'd agree it's "doing one thing".

> games even email client built-in

These are plugins which are loaded on demand. So if you never use them, then they are not loaded into the platform.

I'd say facilities for text editing (buffers, kill rings, etc.) are built in, but nearly everything else -- the different modes for programming languages, games, mail, web, and IRC clients, etc, are all in Emacs Lisp.

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