I’ve written before about Emacs and how it fits into the Unix Philosophy. Those posts all focused on the Unix ideal of
- A program should do one thing and do it well.
The argument is to consider the one thing that Emacs does well is to handle text and consider how it uses that as a sort of universal interface. But the Unix Philosophy is more than the above. It also includes
- Write programs that work together
- Write programs that consume and output text streams
Ashton Wiersdorf also advances the notion that Emacs adheres to the Unix Philosophy but he takes the second and third legs of the philosophy as his starting point. Just as Unix can be thought of as a “tool forge” so, he says, can Emacs. It’s worth reading his argument so I’ll send you over to his post to see it. I will mention, though, that he makes the same point that many others have: it doesn’t matter too much what operating system he’s using because his main interface to his computer is Emacs and that’s the same no matter what OS lies underneath it.
Wiersdorf’s post is short and probably won’t take more than a minute or two to read so it’s worth taking a look.