Chris Maiorana has decided to take the old joke about Emacs being an operating seriously. Or at least at face value. He has planned a series of posts where he compares the Unix way of doing things to the Emacs way.
The first post in the series compares directory listings. That’s a fundamental function for any operating system, of course, so it makes sense—if you’re comping operating systems—to see how they handle that task.
Maiorana’s answer is to look at the various outputs from the Unix ls command and compare them to the results from Dired. There’s not much to compare, of course, because the Dired listings are generated from the underlying ls command. The difference is how you handle options. In Unix this is done through command line options. In Emacs, you change the Dired listing after it’s first displayed with buffer specific commands as usual in Emacs.
The real difference is in the power that Dired provides. You can’t do anything that you couldn’t do in Unix but with Dired it’s all one command. You think of the listing as just another Emacs buffer that you operate on in the usual ways or perhaps bring bespoke commands to bear.
I don’t really believe in the Emacs as OS paradigm—although I sometimes pretend I do. A more accurate description is that those of us who live in Emacs tend to treat it as if it were a shell. With Emacs, there is seldom any need to drop into an actual shell to get things done and even if you do, Emacs can provide you with several including it own eshell.
I’ll be interested to see Maiorana’s subsequent posts on the subject. I’m interested in exploring the extent to which Emacs can be claimed to be an operating system.