9fans archive / 1994 / 02 / 34 /    prev next

From: Scott Deerwester scott@cs....
Subject: Sam and emacs
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 21:16:06 -0500

I knew that I was going to regret bringing this up. :-)

Let's see if I've got this right: the Big Philosophical Reason
that the emacs page is blank in the Plan 9 manual is something
like:

  Okay, fine, emacs has wonderful functionality, and is
  extensible, etc, etc...  but the things that make emacs
  a wonderful tool ought to apply to a whole flinking operating
  environment, not an editor, for Pete's sake.  That's exactly what
  Plan 9 was written for -- to be an operating system that does,
  in a modular and sensible way, what emacs does in a horrible
  monolithic way.

So I really ought to be comparing emacs with Plan 9 (and in
particular with acme, which is the part of the whole Plan that
meets the same goals that emacs-as-world-view meets), and not
with sam, which is a very nice *editor*, like God and Rob
intended.

Am I getting close?

Geez, I only just now realized that acme is a pun on "emacs".
Rob, can I buy a clue, please?