{"id":11013,"date":"2022-12-14T12:47:53","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T17:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11013"},"modified":"2022-12-14T12:47:53","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T17:47:53","slug":"rms-on-what-he-wants-and-doesnt-want-in-emacs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11013","title":{"rendered":"RMS On What He Wants and Doesn’t Want in Emacs"},"content":{"rendered":"

RMS presented a talk at the EmacsConf 2022 meeting on what he\u2019d like to see and not see in Emacs<\/a>. His first point was to dismiss the idea of replacing Elisp with something like JavaScript. Besides the technical infeasibility due to the vast repository of packages written in Elisp, RMS notes that these languages are not as powerful and useful as the Lisp dialects and that it would be foolish to switch even if we could.<\/p>\n

RMS takes this opportunity to deliver a mini-jihad about JavaScript. Everyone loves to hate JavaScript, of course, but it\u2019s hard to see how it can be blamed for its misuse in browsers. Had the JavaScript niche been filled by Scheme\u2014as almost happened\u2014would Stallman still blame Scheme itself for its misuse?<\/p>\n

He discusses many possible ways to change Emacs but to me the most controversial is his desire to support a WYSIWYG word processor in Emacs. I have never understood why anyone would want to do this and I am definitely against it.<\/p>\n

Such editors never live up to their promises and almost always fail to deliver decent final documents. Further, they reduce the user\u2019s control over the final output, something that RMS criticizes modern Web browsers for earlier in his talk. There is no real need for such a thing. Org mode provides any easy way to produce excellent looking documents\u2014typeset with Latex\u2014with a very lightweight markup language. It\u2019s easy\u2014certainly easier than with something like Word or its evil siblings\u2014for a casual user to use it to produce letters and simple documents but it can also be used to produce complex and sophisticated documents.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, what would a file produced by such an extension look like? It certainly wouldn\u2019t be plain text; it would be a proprietary\u2014albeit open source\u2014format. Who needs or wants that? And, of course, it would set up a feature race with Word and similar ilk that would lead to further bloat and incomprehensibility.<\/p>\n

And who, exactly, is the constituency for this feature besides Stallman? I\u2019m pretty sure that there\u2019s not a single user out there who is thinking, \u201cI\u2019d use Emacs if only it had a WYSIWYG word processor\u201d and I\u2019d be surprised if there is any significant number of Emacs users who want such a thing.<\/p>\n

In any event, it\u2019s interesting to get Stallman\u2019s (up to date) views on these issues. The talk is 17 minutes long so plan accordingly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RMS presented a talk at the EmacsConf 2022 meeting on what he\u2019d like to see and not see in Emacs. His first point was to dismiss the idea of replacing Elisp with something like JavaScript. Besides the technical infeasibility due … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-11013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11014,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11013\/revisions\/11014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}