And I remember reading about and using Emacs at the end of the 90s when I was attempting to install and run Linux on that IBM/Lenovo machine I had just bought when I came to Japan. I remember meeting a then not yet world-famous Emacs contributor/blogger in Tokyo, almost 13 years ago and showing her an Emacs book in Japanese I had just bought. I am just a beginner but I have traces of Emacs edited files on my machine dating back at least 10 years. When I need to do relatively complex searches, I still switch to BBEdit (Textwrangler is going to be discontinued and BareBones is planning to default BBEdit to a lite version, except for the paying users who'll be able to unlock the full thing). I still don't do regular expressions in Emacs. Although I started using it about 20 years ago, I never got to actually use it because most of my "writing" work then involved regular expressions and the tool of choice on Mac at the time was BBEdit Lite. org-mode original creators started to add functions to the Emacs outliner, and then everything grew so big that a separate mode was born. Mac has many nice outlining applications where you can put notes in a given hierarchy, sort them, search their contents, use them as reminders or as todo lists, etc. Org-mode was created over the outliner-mode that Emacs provides. You can browse the web, do your mail, write text, read PDF files, etc. Some people say that Emacs is an operating system and that you don't have to leave it to do your computing. In my Emacs, I have installed a chess mode, that allows me to play chess in Emacs, a "deft" mode that emulates in Emacs the behavior of Notational Velocity, the famous note taking app for OSX, I also have apples-mode that transforms Emacs into an Applescript editor or writeroom-mode, that works like all the "distraction-less editors" around, except that it turns Emacs into that distraction-less editor. In Emacs talk, a mode is a group of specialized functions. I wrote above that a lot of people have moved to Emacs because of org-mode. It looks like you're doing things in Emacs and it's easy to organize them because org-mode is here to help you. It does not look like a program, of course. And programs in Lisp written for Emacs have been extending Emacs functions to areas that were never envisioned by the original creators. But besides for Lisp code writing, which it does very well, Emacs is able to write any kind of things. A few years later, copyright issues and headhunting resulted in fewer and fewer people able to freely use and develop Lisp, and that's when Emacs was conceived, at first as a way to put Lisp on any possible machine without limiting them to Lisp Machines, to fight against the people who were attempting to close access to that knowledge.Įmacs now looks like a text editor because a text editor is a required tool to write Lisp code. Its implementation started in autumn 1958 explicitly as a language to research AI at the MIT. Lisp itself is the second-oldest programming language still in use today. And Lisp was the language of choice for AI back then. Lisp machines were computers that understood Lisp down to the CPU. Lisp machines used to be hot in the 80s, when research on AI was at its peak. And a lot of people are confused by that because Emacs is before anything a Lisp virtual machine that was made to run on any platform. Emacs is in fact more than a text editor. It is one of the first "officially" free programs published ever, and it is the beginning of the Free software movement, in a way. But they're what brought me back to writing, and eventually to publishing, at least here and other places.Įmacs is a venerable text editor. Emacs? org-mode? The names are probably unknown to most translators. Some people say they've moved to Emacs because of org-mode. And also because, well, translators on Mac don't seem to have so many issues anymore with the platform. I've not been writing here much for lack of a relatively frictionless process.
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