I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by default. It's an old joke that Emacs is a great operating system in need of a good text editor.

The appeal of Emacs is that I can, at any time, with only a few keystrokes, dig in to how it does something and then modify it. The self-documenting and customizable behavior is extremely pervasive. Emacs Lisp is not just there for extensions. Every single layer of the application--save for core primitives--is implemented in it. All of it can be inspected, modified, swapped out, wrapped, hooked into, and basically do anything you want. There's absolutely nothing else like it.

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kurouna 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for the incredibly insightful comment. I completely agree with your definition of Emacs, and I have the utmost respect for its true nature as a fully programmable Lisp environment. You are absolutely right—that infinite extensibility is what makes Emacs unparalleled.

When I call my project "Emacs-like," I certainly don't mean to deny or replace that beautiful philosophy. I am simply a software engineer who deeply loves the UI, UX, and keybindings that Emacs pioneered.

My goal was just to recreate that specific physical experience as a standalone application. I truly love the sensation of operating an editor entirely by muscle memory and pure reflex—allowing the words in my head to flow seamlessly onto the screen without consciously thinking about the tool itself. I just wanted to package that exact typing experience into a zero-setup app.

By the way, I am very curious about the project you mentioned! What kind of text editor are you working on? I would love to hear about it.

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throwaway27448 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface.

You mean the default keybindings for readline and macos? I think you're greatly overestimating the extent to which you can speak for other emacs users. I love the default keybindings and never even thought to change them, and I very much understand being leery of the lisp runtime. The modal editing of vim, doom etc always struck me as pointless typing and too much like issuing commands rather than making typing an extension of your fingers.

This isn't for me (electron—blah; I have microemacs etc), but I 100% get it.

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xigoi 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Vim keybindings are not optimized for typing, but for editing.

	▲	skydhash an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah! For typing, you could use cat and be done with it. But you think about editing, then ed(1) start to make sense. You think about it a little more and ex(1) makes sense. You want better visual feedback and vi(1) is born. And then you want more programming features and you’ll get vim. Emacs is what you get when you sidestep the whole process with something as versatile as lisp. Instead of being economical with commands, you just create the specific actions you want

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stevekemp 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have to agree, if only because when I hear "the emacs keybindings" I wonder, does that mean the defaults that nobody uses, or the ones I've carried around for 20+ years?

As a quick example "M-g" ("Esc" [pause] "g") has been bound to "goto-line" in my emacs startup file for at least 20 years, and is something I press without even really thinking about.

There are many default keys (such as C-x C-f for finding a file), but even core functionality gets rebound to suit my preferences.

	▲	rpdillon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I use default keybindings, FWIW. But I agree that my ability to shape Emacs into exactly the tool I want with lisp is the main draw for me.