Why Isn’t There An Emacs 2?

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Available-Inside1426 asks why there isn’t an Emacs 2. By that he means a rewrite of Emacs to address what he sees as problems with Emacs. Those problems include the usual silliness like a better GUI implementation, better mouse support, a client-server architecture, and so on. The only improvement he suggests that makes sense to me is implementing threads.

Of course, everyone would like Emacs to have a robust thread implementation but the problems are legion. Here’s an account of one brave soul’s attempt to implement them. The TL;DR is that in the end he gave up because there’s just too much shared state built into Emacs.

One thing you hear all the time and that Available-Inside1426 repeats is that “Emacs was made for a different world”. I don’t know what that means. Sure, Emacs was made in a different world but I don’t think it’s true that it was made for a different world. After all, it was made to edit text as efficiently as possible and in that it still performs better than any other editor. My cynical suspicion is that what “made for another world” really means is that it doesn’t have enough bling, and is not centered on point and click.

Emacs development is, in fact, proceeding apace and everyone with even a bit of software development experience knows that rewriting a mature system always ends in tears. Emacs doesn’t need to be rewritten. Sure, some things would benefit from improvement but that exact process is always underway. Your pet wish may not be as high on the list as you’d like but if it’s worthwhile, it will certainly be implemented eventually. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even get a good thread model.

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