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Comment by zombiwoof | Hacker News Reader

I had always thought James Gosling helped create Emacs with Guy

Gosling created a Unix clone of the PDP-10 Emacs in 1981, about five years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

And I still have the manual in printed form somewhere in my archives. Maybe I should scan it, unless archive.org already has a copy ...

Ah cool! Thanks for clarifying that for me

multics emacs and lisp-machine emacs also predated gosmacs, which drew a lot of features from them, most notably being scripted in lisp (though gosmacs's lisp was a pathetic sort of thing called 'mocklisp')

Multics Emacs and the Lisp Machine EINE/ZWEI/ZMACS were also implemented in Lisp, they did not use an embedded scripting Lisp implementation. There is no boundary between an implementation and scriptling language, just one Lisp (Maclisp for Multics Emacs and Lisp Machine Lisp (aka ZetaLisp) for EINE/ZWEI/ZMACS), which in the case of the Lisp Machine also was used to implement the rest of the operating system and all its applications.

yes, and i should have said that, but gosmacs didn't copy that aspect of their design, just the ability to extend the editor in (mock) lisp

arguably gnu emacs is almost like multics emacs in this sense; the editing functionality of gnu emacs without any lisp code loaded is not actually zero but is pretty minimal. and i was surprised to find the other day that gnu emacs on my laptop is now compiling all my elisp to machine code, which is another similarity to maclisp, albeit a very recent one

For a similar situation today, there is the editor lem which is an Emacs-clone written in Common Lisp (and whose extension language is also Common Lisp).

also edwin, in mit scheme: https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/stable...

more generally, though, even if you aren't using a gui library with a built-in text editor widget, gigahertz and gigaflops make it not especially challenging to write a usable text editor in a high-level language. http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/edumb.py is 183 lines of fairly straightforward python and includes full-text search and infinite undo; it's not quite usable but pretty close. its really stupid buffer data structure might start to get unresponsive once you're editing a file in the neighborhood of 100k

Yes Zmacs, my favorite editor of all times. Together with the space cadet keyboard and its control, meta, super and hyper keys.

the keyboard enthusiast community has advanced to the point that you ought to be able to get any keyboard you want manufactured affordably now?

Sadly, USB-HID does not define a hyper key, so no USB keyboard has a true hyper key. What one can do is configure the keyboard to emit a different, little-used key, and then configure X to recognize that key as hyper. I think what I do is emit left super for both super keys, and right super for both hyper keys, and then X turns right super into Hyper_L. Or something like that. This doesn’t bother me, because I don’t want to assign different meanings to the physical left and right super or left and right hyper keys — folks who do (e.g. for games) might not like it.

I also had to do a little bit of magic to get hyper recognised as a modifier.

It would be awesome if someone could get Hyper added to the official list of USB keyboard keys.

excellent! have you written up your configuration somewhere? are you using a public keyboard firmware?

at the other end of the spectrum, i just hacked together this stupid shell script to blindly reimpose my desired xkb configuration with lower-case parens yesterday: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/kbdd maybe you know the actually correct way to do this?

There's no need, there's already this thing of beauty:

https://keymacs.com/

I actually own an original one (and some other goodies from my lispm time), I "just" need an adapter, but my electronics manufacturing / soldering talent is not adequate, sigh ;-0

If you're in the SF bay area, we might be able to get one put together... I've built several adapters for mice and keyboards, assuming the voltage levels are compatible it's mostly a matter of twiddling the right pins on a microcontroller. In return I would want to pick your brain about your lispm time :)

i wonder if alfred szmidt, lars brinkhoff, or someone they know could set you up with an adaptor?

Oh my! :-)

Sure could help out .. pipe me an email. It isn't that hard to do, and doesn't modify the original in anyway.

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