It's a great OS.
I mean, Emacs is an OS, right? They've certainly crammed enough things into it to make it an OS.
I mean, Emacs is an OS, right? They've certainly crammed enough things into it to make it an OS.
There's no scheduler inside Emacs. In contrast, there is something very much like a scheduler inside Firefox and inside Google Chrome so that more than one browser tab can make computational progress "simultaneously".
What Emacs does have (at least when it is running on a Unix-like OS rather than on Windows) is a way to use the underlying OS to create and manage child processes. I.e., a way to add processes to the OS's scheduler. But a terminal-emulation app that lets the user create and manage multiple terminal-emulation windows or tabs has the same capability, and no one calls it an OS with an OS.
Moreover, the programs `screen` and `tmux` also have that capability, and no one call them OSes within OSes.
People who like Emacs sometimes treat it like a generalized interface to information. But the combination of a Unix shell and a terminal-emulation app ("the Unix commandline") is often treated the same way, and no one calls it an OS within an OS. Ditto a simple web browser like Lynx.
EDIT: replaced "OS" with "OS within an OS" to try to make my argument less vulnerable to jacquesm's reply.
Meh. If you have to call it an OS, it isn't one.
Really? I thought I had an original thought there for a second. So, someone, somewhere, agrees with me out there.