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I know that Emacs certainly has a lot of flaws, as the lovely piece of
1970s tech it is. If you don’t want to get into Emacs, you shouldn’t
have to. Feel free to move along.
And don’t take that last paragraph as meant to scare you away or
gatekeep you. If you do want to get into Emacs, here’s my introhere’s my intro.
In other words, I’m neither writing this to convince the Emacs haters,
nor to those who already want to get into it. This one I’m writing for
those who are neither; those who are curious.
You know how in the Unix shell, you can have programs and they can talk to each other through pipelines, env vars, and command line args, right?
[Emacs] is a similar environment, although its functions can compose in even more ways. Not only that, the ways they can compose is itself extensible, so over the years people have invented “hooks” and “advice” and “macros” and more. It’s a mess is what it is, but it’s a very flexible mess.
It has a ton of stuff already, including being able to run Unix shell functions, so it can do a superset of what a normal shell can do.