Unix is often credited with being the first portable operating system because it was written in a higher level language and could relatively easily be ported to new machines. That portability changed everything. But this post isn’t about Unix; it’s about Emacs.
It’s almost a cliche to make the case that Emacs has more in common with an operating system than it does with an editor. Here at Irreal, our favored comparison is with the Lisp machines from the 1980s. Emacs isn’t an operating system, of course, nor is it really a Lisp machine but one thing it is is portable. By that I mean that you can take your Emacs environment with you regardless of the OS or machine you happen to be working on. If, like many of us, you do almost everything in Emacs, you end up with what amounts to a portable operating system, or at least a portable operating environment.
Again, that’s hardly an original thought but it was brought home to me last week because of WWDC. As most of you know, I live (happily) in the Apple ecosystem and like it for reasons that I’ve discussed before. But after reading about all of Apple’s neat new features coming to the Mac and iOS (and now ipadOS) apps, I realized that I didn’t really care. Not because I thought they were uninspired or boring—quite the opposite—but because nice as they were I wouldn’t be using them since most of the new functionality exists in some form in Emacs.
Consider the Reminders app. It exists across Macs, iPhones, and iPads and is already quite nice. Apple is making significant improvements to it in the new releases of the OSs this summer but the thing is, I do all those chores with Org mode and if I need some special capability, it’s easy to just add it so I won’t be using Reminders’ neat new features. The same thing applies to many of the other changes: They’re nice but Emacs has me covered and it has me covered regardless of what machine I happen to be working on. As a wise man said, “I don’t care what OS I use because…”
Now if we only had Emacs for iOS and ipadOS.