> A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel level.

Only because Lisp Machines, or variations thereof didn't took off in the mainstream.

"Symbolics Lisp Machine demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

"Emacs and Lisp"

https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/emacs-and-lisp.html

While Emacs was forked by Lucid as XEmacs to make one of the very first ideas of LSP, nowadays most features have been integrated back into Emacs

https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html

"Lucid Energize Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

• charcircuit

  today at 11:14 AM

  Even if LISP machines took off, an editor running on them still would not be an OS. Such claims come from people who don't understand what a platform is and who can conflate any platform with an operating system. You also see these people calling web browsers operating systems. By this flawed definition you could even call things like Roblox an operating system.

  • pjmlp

    today at 11:47 AM

    "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one"

    -- Dan Ingalls

    • mananaysiempre

      today at 1:02 PM

      As long as you don’t care about interlanguage interop, sure. The opposite point of view, that every language tries to become an operating system (and consequently to prevent other languages from coexisting), is also possible, and I’m somewhat more sympathetic to that one.

      • pjmlp

        today at 1:40 PM

        That is mostly a non issue on microservices and serverless runtimes running on top of type 1 hypervisors, and bare metal embedded deployments.

        • tvink

          today at 3:27 PM

          I'm unsure why you point this out. It's also a non issue if you're trying to drive a unicycle. Isn't it more interesting to talk about the cases where it applies? Or do you reckon all programs should be microservices?

    • bcjdjsndon

      today at 12:01 PM

      In the Linux world, isn't the c compiler necessary for Linux to function?

      • TylerE

        today at 12:11 PM

        To build? Sure.

        To run? Absolutely not.

    • charcircuit

      today at 12:12 PM

      Developers love building on platforms. Saying there shouldn't be platforms defies reality.

      Edit: Looking up the quote it seems to just be the person being pedantic in how they define operating systems.

      • wtetzner

        today at 1:12 PM

        Given his work on Smalltalk, I suspect he means that he prefers the line between language runtime and operating system to be erased, and they be the same thing.

        I disagree though. While there are benefits to that approach, I feel like language innovation would be stifled to a certain degree.

        • convolvatron

          today at 1:55 PM

          that seems backwards to me. one of the primary constraints in language development is the OS api. programs that don't interact with the world are increasingly less interesting, and you really have to work hard and be clever to change the file and its semantics, the socket, or the thread. these things have sharp edges and tend to be leaky.

          • wtetzner

            today at 4:42 PM

            > that seems backwards to me

            I'm not sure I completely understand which part you find backwards. Do you mean merging language runtimes and the OS is a bad idea, or that you think merging them would lead to more innovation?

            I can see an argument for both (in terms of innovation), but being able to run only one language environment on a computer at a given time would make it much harder and heavy weight to use new languages. Or at the very least, new language runtimes.

      • raverbashing

        today at 1:36 PM

        > Edit: Looking up the quote it seems to just be the person being pedantic in how they define operating systems.

        What a surprise

        Pragmatism beats idealism in the real world

This just proves that you can cram pretty much anything into the client/server dichotomy if you just define "client", "server" and "request" broad enough. Similarly, I remember how desperately people tried to argue that Emacs follows the "Unix philosophy" as long as your LISP functions are doing just one thing, and do them well. I don't know what you would gain from these things. Emacs follows the idea of LISP machines, I think that much anybody can agree on. From there, Emacs can be or do pretty much whatever you want. It's excellent in communicating with CLI tools - you can call that client/server if you want, but I wouldn't know what you'd gain from that definition. The reality is that Emacs has gone through a lot of fads and hypes over its decades of existence, and each time, it has taken something along the way. Heck, there's a whole semantic parsing engine buried within (CEDET), which nowadays is pretty much unused, because then LSPs came along, and now we have agents (which Emacs btw is a pretty decent frontend for).

• znpy

  today at 3:30 PM

  > Heck, there's a whole semantic parsing engine buried within (CEDET), which nowadays is pretty much unused

  In fairness that used to be common to have in most IDEs.

  I don’t know if it’s still the case but i remember that the first java language server was spun off the Eclipse’s java semantic parsing engine.

I've been an Emacs user for over 25 years. But last year I switched employers and they won't let me use it even for tasks where it would absolutely shine. Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point.

Unfortunately, I failed to convince my employer to make everybody else switch to Emacs.

So, now I'm using lots of one-purpose tools, one for each separate task, a good deal less efficiently than I could use Emacs, and I'm still learning all the new UIs and keyboard mappings.

• masfoobar

  today at 1:16 PM

  At a company I work for, they are doing various changes (and control) over the software we install as we transition to a larger company. I believe they are using Microsoft Intune so they can allow/deny what can be installed.

  I have not updated my laptop (or got a new one) because I am concerned they will not allow me to install or continue to use Emacs. Honestly, I can vision how that conversation goes:-

  [manager]: Hi, so what is Emacs

  [me]: Emacs is a text editor I use daily and makes me efficient in my work

  [manager]: OK. I would like us to start using Visual Studio Code with the new projects coming up

  [me]: Why? The consumption models we are using has no VSCode support, anyway.

  [manager]: It would just be good if we are all using the same tools

  [me]: It should not matter what we use as long as we work with git and deployment. If someone else is great with a different text editor why force them to use something else?

  [manager]: (Looks up emacs)

  [manager]: I think its best we stopped using it because it is not supported by Microsoft and we need to be careful with the dangers of open source.

  [me]: OK. Should we contact other IT departments to replace any open source tools they use?

  [manager]: Its just emacs is not verified software for the business. I think you are complicating things a little (tries to belittle me)

  [me]: Emacs is my daily driver! If it goes, I will hand in my resignation!

  * Manager is not there to understand or reason.. he is just following orders from other IT departments. *

  • kleiba2

    today at 1:27 PM

    I worked briefly in public administration at one point in my career. I asked the admins the same thing, could I get Emacs installed on my machine. I got a bit concerned when the admin staff asked back: "What is Emacs?"

    • bitwize

      today at 3:29 PM

      I was a bit surprised when about ten years ago I noticed that there were now really only two reactions to my Emacs use:

      "Emacs? What's that? Oh, sorry, I like things with an actual UI."

      Or:

      "Emacs? I remember that from my DEC days. I'm surprised it's still around!"

  • ks6g10

    today at 1:25 PM

    I scheduled my intune upgrade when I needed a week off for doing house moving stuff. I was told Emacs would work, didn't. Took them about a week before I could use it again.

  • znpy

    today at 3:24 PM

    Back in the day when i had a windows laptop for work you could just download the windows binary distribution of emacs and run that, has something changed?

    • masfoobar

      today at 3:29 PM

      This is what I do when I use Windows. However, in recent years, I tend to use Emacs via WSL.

      However, I believe Microsoft Intune is used within the Business to control what software can and cannot be installed. So my guess is Windows won't allow you to install via a typical .exe

      I am not suggesting the above is 100% valid. I just don't want to get a new laptop and find out. Maybe I can still use Emacs via WSL... bypassing Intune????

      At the end of the day, I understand Security is getting much more serious in recent years - and we even have a dedicated department - but controlling the software to install is crazy, especially for a development team.

      • MarsIronPI

        today at 5:33 PM

        Does Intune stop you from running any unapproved .exe's? Because IIRC Emacs can run as a "portable" executable that doesn't need to be installed in Program Files.

        (I don't have any experience with Intune so pardon my ignorance.)

  • jhghbj

    today at 1:24 PM

    [dead]

• isityettime

  today at 5:38 PM

  What about the job is so good as to make you tolerate this?

• Arubis

  today at 4:04 PM

  Having everyone on a team have different personalities is managerially inefficient. You have to deal with each team member in a different way instead of being able to have a unified emotional approach. So we required frontal lobotomies for everyone on the team.

• clircle

  today at 1:57 PM

  Emacs users (myself included) would feel less like cramming every aspect of our work into Emacs if more tools embodied the freedom and hackability that comes with using Emacs. It's not that Emacs is better, it's that other tools are more restrictive and not self-documenting.

  • NoGravitas

    today at 3:05 PM

    It's also helpful that you get a certain degree of UI consistency from things like completing-read being used everywhere. And even when some package departs from convention, everything is still a buffer, so anything in it is easy to reuse.

• wtetzner

  today at 1:15 PM

  > Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point.

  Why is that a valid point?

  • tom_alexander

    today at 1:23 PM

    In my case, I am a very senior member of my team so 25-50% of each day is spent helping and/or teaching teammates. In situations like that, it is useful to be deeply familiar with the tools that your teammates are using so you can tell them exactly what to do.

    For example, if I'm teaching a new hire to set up their vscode it is not very helpful to tell them "now you need to activate the python venv". It is much more helpful to be able to tell them "Now we're going to activate the python venv. To do that, open your command palette and search for 'select python interpreter'".

    In my personal life, I still exclusively use emacs (which I have scripted to auto-detect venvs) but I put up with using vscode at work to be a greater utility to my team.

    • tvink

      today at 3:31 PM

      Idunno. I think you end up teaching them nothing and just doing it for them. I mentor plenty folks without learning more than basics of vscode/cursor, and the most important lesson for them is always how to figure out how to do stuff (which has never been easier than today).

      • wtetzner

        today at 4:35 PM

        Yeah, I kinda feel like when you're mentoring people, you should let them drive. If you're going to do it for them, you might as well just record a training video.

    • shakow

      today at 1:26 PM

      At some point, shouldn't installing a venv be a pre-requisite to actually be hired as a dev?

      • kleiba2

        today at 1:30 PM

        That was just an example.

        The point of the parent is that in an ideal situation, where everything works without flaw, theoretically it makes no difference which tools everyone uses. In real life, you having a homogeneous setup across a team makes the sysadmin's job a lot easier.

      • today at 1:32 PM

• skilning

  today at 1:32 PM

  > Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point

  No. That's only a valid point if something about the tool must be shared between users, rather than just the output. Emacs is a text editor. It reads, modifies, and produces text. The correct tool for each team member to use is the one they're most productive with, full stop.

  Jesus fucking Shiva while Odin watches, but I hate corporate management "thinking". It's just become more and more brain-dead over the decades.

• rglullis

  today at 4:03 PM

  > Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point.

  Why?! It is a text editor for crying out loud. If you are more productive using the tools you want, don't cost anything to the company and doesn't force your colleagues to adopt your workflow, you could be working with notepad for all I care.

• jerf

  today at 12:57 PM

  ... how would they tell?

  • kleiba2

    today at 1:24 PM

    By looking at my screen? But also, why would you disobey a direct instruction from you super?

    • skilning

      today at 1:36 PM

      > why would you disobey a direct instruction from you super?

      Because the instruction was stupid, based on marketing instead of utility, or otherwise given without any thought to how it impacts the actual day-to-day work of their subordinates.

      Why WOULDN'T you disobey a stupid instruction? What's the difference between "stop using this tool you're productive in and switch to this one that you're demonstrably LESS productive in for no reason other than I heard it was a good idea", and "Go strap some rocks onto your ankles and swim the English channel. I heard that was a good idea."?

      • cindyllm

        today at 1:44 PM

        [dead]

    • Grombobulous

      today at 5:23 PM

      I know the job market is rough right not but I sure hope it isn’t so bad that senior engineers like yourself have to tolerate micromanagement at this level.

      I don’t consider telling a manager that something is not a reasonable ask to be an act of disobedience.

      There is too much power distance between yourself and your manager.

One of the pivotal moments in my career has been when I used Emacs just enough to truly understand what "Emacs is an operating system" means, not just as a joke but as something I could believe in

• bcjdjsndon

  today at 12:05 PM

  But you already had an operating system and you could already code... Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before? Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

  You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic

  • ordu

    today at 5:07 PM

    > Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

    Technically, it is just a text editor. It was created to be a text editor, so you are right, but up to a point.

    Emacs is written in lisp, what it means? It means that the only part of emacs written in C is a lisp machine. And even not the whole lisp machine is written in C: there is a rudimentary read-eval-print loop (REPL), and maybe a bytecode interpreted. This REPL I believe is just to boot up purposes and is replaced with proper lisp implementation on later boot up stages. It is not lisp added to a text editor, it is a text editor added to lisp. It means, in particular, you can add to that lisp not just text editor but anything else too, like mspaint for example.

    And people do just that. They write software in emacs. In particular they wrote IDE in emacs, so while emacs by itself is not an IDE, you can turn it into one.

    > some general purpose automation harness

    Oh, it is. It is more general than any other automation harness you know. It is a lisp machine, you can automate anything in it. Well, technically you can, in practice it can take take too much time to be practical. In practice when choosing automation harness, you'd prefer not the most general, but the most specific harness for your task.

  • shakow

    today at 1:04 PM

    > Don't forget this is a text editor, not [a] general purpose automation harness

    This arguable. I personally use emacs for text editing for sure, but not only: it also does emails (notmuch), git (magit), team & project management (org), mastodon, fleet management (nix + colmena + custom elisp functions), and, more importantly, all these “applications” can mutually share data.

    So can you use emacs as a text editor only? Sure. Can you leverage its intrinsic abilities to reach what might be called an automation harness? Yes as well.

  • ryukafalz

    today at 12:37 PM

    It certainly did for me, because it let me trivially write code that integrates deeply into the rest of the system.

    A simple example: I wrote a function that let me highlight an X.509 cert in a YAML document, regardless of indentation, and pass it to 'openssl x509' to show me what it is. This has saved me lots of time over the years not having to copy/paste, fiddle with whitespace, etc. But it's only valuable because the functionality is now right at my fingertips in the environment I'm already in!

  • homarp

    today at 5:36 PM

    the analogy is you have mspaint (or blender)

    you add MCP (or an API)

    suddenly with llama.cpp and a small model like qwen 3.6 35B, you can automate things by just asking.

    emacs same thing, you can 'script' everything. Except no LLM needed

  • rausr

    today at 12:18 PM

    > Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

    It's more correctly a Lisp execution environment with a text editor added as a bonus ;)

    • noufalibrahim

      today at 12:34 PM

      A lisp interpreter with text editing primitives.

  • wmedrano

    today at 1:51 PM

    I think of Emacs as more of a lisp machine than text editor. I'm also not sure what an IDE has over Emacs. I have autocomplete, compiler checks, and run tests all within Emacs.

    For general automation, my blog is built with Emacs Lisp.

  • jerf

    today at 1:46 PM

    It sounds like you think emacs is some sort of basic text editor, I dunno, like Notepad on Windows, that has an adjoined Lisp interpreter?

    Admittedly, it doesn't help that there are some sibling comments that implicitly seem to be speaking that way.

    However, Emacs is a 42-year-old software program that has been in constant development this entire time. Its git repository has over 180,000 commits right now on its main branch, which is still 20,000 ahead of VSCode. It doesn't just have a Lisp editor attached, it has 1.6 million lines of Lisp in it as well, and that's just the source repo, not all of the extensions you can get for it. Using "cloc" to count the total lines of source it has, it's still pretty close to 2/3rds the lines of code than VSCode has, at 2,613,748 for emacs versus 3,849,521 for VSCode. So that's the scale we're talking here, something on par with an IDE, not something on par with a simple text editor.

    Yes, it gives you a lot of capabilities you didn't have before. The joke about it being a decent OS that needs a good text editor comes from the fact it has a large number of things it can do out of the box that aren't just text editing. It isn't just Notepad with a Lisp interpreter attached. It has vast capabilities that have been implemented and then also tested over the course of decades. Considering the set of disadvantages it carries with it, like weird key bindings and the fact that the variant of lisp it uses is more-or-less unique to emacs, somewhat analogously to the handicap principle [1] one should counterintuitively understand that as a sign that it must have extraordinary strengths that are able to offset that.

    (I've used it for a long time, but I never really learned Lisp. AIs are making it much easier to customize than ever, though. I've said many times here on HN that I think every line of AI code should be reviewed. So yesterday I prompted Claude to build some Lisp functions so I can declare 1. a base directory 2. a regex of file names to match and produce 3. a function to walk over the entire directory forwards or backwards with CTRL-x CTRL-n or CTRL-x CTRL-p, thus allowing me to easily walk through an entire project for review purposes systematically. Nobody had to give me permission to do that. I didn't need to "create an extension". I don't have to care if anyone else in the world wants it. It's not the only editor that can do this as easily as emacs but it's a short list.)

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

    • adrian_b

      today at 2:03 PM

      Fortunately all the "weird key bindings" can be easily changed.

      The only difficulty is caused by the fact that already each Emacs mode may change some of the key bindings. Because of that, before deciding on some key bindings you prefer, it is wise to first check the bindings used in all the Emacs modes that you are likely to use frequently, in order to choose bindings that would not conflict with any of those modes.

      • scoops_

        today at 4:58 PM

        There is a decent solution for this, you essentially define your own minor mode with key bindings you want to take precedence. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but seems useful in theory https://youtu.be/D99GB591Vgo

  • forlorn_mammoth

    today at 2:02 PM

    > Don't forget this [emacs] is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

    How familiar are you with Emacs?

  • wtetzner

    today at 1:33 PM

    > You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow?

    TBH that does sound pretty awesome, assuming good primitive operations were exposed through the Lisp API.

    • patrickmay

      today at 1:37 PM

      It would become AutoCAD. That is pretty awesome.

  • coldtea

    today at 2:12 PM

    >Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

    It's all 3 and way more.

    >You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic

    That much is a given (for both)

  • lelanthran

    today at 12:52 PM

    > Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before?

    `M-x docter` is something I never had before.

  • skydhash

    today at 12:40 PM

    The Emacs API is kinda huge, with things like very raw network API, a very good approximation of fork/exec process management, buffers as the base communication mechanism with a lot of capabilities, various utility function with regards to interfacing with the user (windows, frame, faces, keyboard events), then the hooks and advice subsystem.

    With Unix, most programs are binary and while the shell is a good glue language, you can’t alter a program and the OS that much. With Emacs, only the core coded in C is sacred, anything else can be modified to fit your workflow. And there’s a lot of packages out there to provide you with raw materials.

I have been using emacs for the past couple of years. Started because I wanted to try out org mode and stayed for the extreme flexibility it offers.

• smitty1e

  today at 11:00 AM

  I've been on spacemacs.org for a while, but since I've got a Keychron G6 Pro where I can reprogram the caps lock, I'm going to try out some hard-core init.el stylings.

  Suggestions welcome.

  • mimo84

    today at 11:22 AM

    I also started on spacemacs but then I wanted to learn the basics of it and switched to writing my own configuration from scratch. What helped me the most is reading though the Mastering Emacs book by Mickey Petersen which is an amazing resource to learn the basics and beyond. Right now I'm in the process of reducing the number of external packages I use and I'm trying to use more of the built in functionality that is available "out of the box".

    • smitty1e

      today at 11:56 AM

      Nice.

      I'm going to go through https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs as well as https://www.masteringemacs.org/

I learned a while ago that eMacs is more like a programming environment that has a text editor built in. Sort of like some SmallTalk images. When you think of it this way it’s pretty neat.

Came across this recently, which I find is a good and short intro to Emacs for people who don't use it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZDmO5yOxE

• pedro_caetano

  today at 12:41 PM

  Now I am really curious to see Anon Emoose's init.el

It's a shell not an operating system but the concept of a shell isn't commonly understood.

• archargelod

  today at 12:31 PM

  I see shell as an instrument through which you use other tools. In that sense, vi feels much more like a shell, because you have to use other standard unix programs with `:.!` for much functionality.

  Where Emacs comes with all bells and whistles included in one big distribution, much like an operating system.

  • cturner

    today at 1:10 PM

    Something that undermines the operating system angle is that emacs does not implement hardware drivers. All interaction with the computer go via system calls.

    Norton Commander contains a text editor. Emacs operates at that level, whilst being reprogrammable.

Emacs itself can run as a client and server. To start the server:

  emacs --daemon

Unfortunately it only works locally. I've tried to forward the emacs server socket over ssh to a remote client and it doesn't work.

• MarsIronPI

  today at 5:39 PM

  Forwarding the socket doesn't work, but if you use X11 then you can use `ssh -X`, and the remote Emacs will open a frame on your local X server.

  Do beware though that if you use the non-PGTK GTK build, closing this new frame will crash the remote Emacs.

• rozularen

  today at 2:53 PM

  could you see the reason it didn't work?

  • SoftTalker

    today at 3:46 PM

    It's been a number of years, and all I really remember is coming to the conclusion that "emacsclient only works with a local server." It uses a domain socket for this, but forwarding that from a remote server doesn't seem to be enough.

    Simply editing a remote file over an ssh connection is easy enough using TRAMP, but that isn't the same as accessing existing buffers in a remote server.

I did not get this argument. Diagrams are nice, and I probably missed something in lisp code (not used to lisp syntax), but I see no argument that Emacs has more service-like interaction with other apps or its plugins than say vim or vscode. I agree that emacs is the most OS-like, but I would love if someone explained what exactly is the point in the article

In Emacs, everything looks like a part of the core system. The whole thing is just one unvariegated blob of Lisp, which could be a strength or a weakness depending on your perspective. Me, I happen to like that sort of thing.

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