Joe Marsahll has been blogging up a storm lately. One of his latest posts is a sort of personal history of Emacs and its relationship to Lisp. When Marshall started as an undergraduate, he was using the line oriented editor TECO. If you think your experience with an editor is difficult, read his description of what it was like to use TECO.
Soon he was directed to Vi and a whole new world was opened to him. He no longer had to work in the blind but could actually see what he was doing. Later, when he moved to MIT he was introduced to Lisp and various early incarnations of what we now think of as “Emacs”.
Emacs, of course, began life as a set of macros for TECO so, in a sense, Marshall revisited TECO when he started working at the MIT AI lab. but the Lisp Machines that were developed in the AI lab had their own Emacs clone integrated into the system. In his career he has used a wide variety of Emacs-like editors but like all of us he’s using GNU Emacs these days.
One of the things Marshall talks about is using Sly with Emacs to recreate his experiences on the Lisp Machine. Sly, he says, pretty much recreates the interface that you had using ZWEI—an early version of Emacs—on a Lisp Machine. I’m still using Slime for my Lisp coding but, as I have written many times, I have a long standing urge to work on a Lisp Machine so I may give Sly a try if only to get closer to the Lisp Machine experience.