Lynn Leichtle over at Lynn has an interesting post on using Emacs as a Guix file manager. Almost all of my work these days takes place in the Apple milieu so, of course, I’m not a Guix user and can’t speak with even pretend authority about it. Still, Lynn’s post is easy enough to understand. She does most of her work in Emacs and finds that she has no need for a file manager. Emacs handles all that for her. But occasionally, for reasons you can read about at her post, she wants to click on a directory and have it open in Emacs dired.
It turns out that Guix can do this for you fairly easily. See her post for the details if you have a similar need.
Lynn’s post made me realize that I have actually embraced the old joke about Emacs being an OS. Of course I don’t need a file manager; that’s what Dired is for. And if I open a directory in Emacs, I’m popped right into a Dired buffer for that directory.
Furthermore, I don’t really need anything like Guix either. I hardly ever load third party packages—other than Emacs, of course—and when I do I usually get them from the app store, or Homebrew both of which take care of all the things Guix would do. When I do need a third party application, it’s almost always an Emacs package and, of course, Emacs handles all that pretty much seamlessly.
Given all that, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Emacs really has become my OS. Basically, everything I do, I do from within Emacs. You could call that obsessive but I call it simplifying my life.