Reply to jynx (RPoD): Living in emacs

Jynx mentioned experimenting with "living" in Emacs. As somebody who

made the shift from "using" Emacs (an on/off ~20yr state) to living

in emacs a few years ago, I just want to say: welcome! It's a cozy

place to live, and you're always in complete control of your environment.

For those who don't understand why on earth anyone might bury themselves

inside their text editor, the reason this makes sense is that Emacs

is less an editor and more a live programming environment. In the same

sense that Smalltalk environments like Squeak provide. Such environments

do not impose a distinction between programmer and user. They provide you

with a sandpit and tools which already do some stuff, but also make it

as easy as possible to do other stuff - your stuff.

We tend to forget that the reason computers are amazing is not that they

can do "x" where "x" is whatever some expert decided to allow you to do,

but that they are in fact "universal machines". And of course it's in

the interest of big tech and many governments that we forget this.

Environments like Emacs are some of the few remaining bastions of this

important idea.