This is the best blog post about Emacs in a long time. I’m still laughing. Buttery Smooth Emacs, Friday, October 28, 2016.
«GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype.»
«Emacs organizes its view of the outside world into frames (what the rest of the world calls “windows”), windows (which the rest of the world calls “panes”), and buffers (which the rest of the world calls “documents”).»
«Did Emacs just adapt to whatever these non-Xt toolkits did? Did Emacs adopt modern best practices? GTK+ is a modern GUI library. Emacs supports GTK+. Is Emacs a well-behaved GTK+ program now?»
«What’s particularly hilarious is that SIGIO can happen in the middle of redisplay. The REPL loop (in the Emacs case, not Read Eval Print, but Read Eval WTF) can be recursive.»
No, really. This blog post just keeps on giving.
(I don’t get why people use Facebook as their blog but whatever, this blog post is great.)
#Emacs
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It’s a great write-up, but this isn’t right: “...a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit....” Symbolics certainly didn’t get its window system ideas from Xt.
– Arthur A. Gleckler 2018-02-13 01:25 UTC
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I’d be surprised if everything else is right! 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2018-02-13 07:08 UTC
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More tales from `redisplay`.
– AlokSingh 2018-02-14 06:39 UTC
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The joy of CTRL S and CTRL Q! «It is also a great tragedy that you don’t get DSR/DTR lines on these “modern” serial ports, which means you have to use inline XON/XOFF flow control. Like an animal.»
Good stuff, thanks Alok!
– Alex Schroeder 2018-02-14 13:12 UTC