I love to see new Emacs Lisp projects, BUT: personally I prefer a simple ‘pure Emacs standard library’ experience as much as possible. I have been using Emacs over 40 years and this return to simplicity is a new thing for me.

I used to have a Xerox Lisp Machine in the 1980s and dreamed to have Emacs be the ‘catch all’ environment like a Lisp Machine. Now I mostly just use Emacs to edit code.

▲

compyman 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You might be sort of interested in the Emulate-A-Terminal (EAT) package: https://codeberg.org/akib/emacs-eat which provides a very fast terminal emulator entirely in emacs lisp.

▲

mbrumlow 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I use eat. So far it’s been the best one. But I did have to fix a few bugs, and add kkp support to it. It’s not the fastest but it gets the job done.

	▲	compyman 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What did you need to fix! And what did you need KKP for? are you running emacs in eat?
	▲	jsw 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you have any of your fixes publicly available?

▲

sidkshatriya 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am partial to your sentiment but I don't think writing all the terminal handling code in elisp gives us code that might be too interesting to read (to me at least).

Understanding the VT state machine and all its quirks and inconsistencies is not high up in my list of code I'd like to learn. It is good it is packaged up in a library and emacs is just a consumer of it.

libghostty will have excellent compatibility and features rather than an elisp implementation that maybe half baked.

I stopped living in the world of turtles all the way down. Now I'm more like, hey is this is good library ? Is it integrated well ? It does not matter if it is in zig, rust, c++, lisp, scheme, ...

	▲	anthk 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Jitted Elisp for itself has much more power because of function composability than badly reusing libraries without even a common API like OLE/COM under Windows. You are just creating silos badly interopearting together. Even 9front has something like 9p, namespaces and everything it's truly a file. Even GNU/Emacs under Hurd doesn't have its full power developed until the GNU people ditch Gnuplot for their own GNU-born capable 3D plotutils and the like. And today given the speed of jitted Emacs if I were the Calc maintainer I'd try to write a PNG/farfbled (or whatever it's called) plotting tool in pure Elisp, with both TTY and graphical outputs. Depending on non-GNU, external tools it's holding GNU and Elisp back.

▲

anthk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd use Emacs if they:

- Purged are gnuplot dependencies with a custom and actual GNU bound 3d plotting software. GNU calc for Emacs should have been working with core Emacs libraries long ago.

- Plotutils extended for 3D should have been mandatory long ago

- GNU made Texinfo not be Texlive dependant for PDF/HTML output. Texinfo should have been standalone a la mandoc it's under Unix for PDF output.