Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rpi!rpi.edu!rodney From: rodney@taac.ipl.rpi.edu (Rodney Peck II) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Why does emacs do so much that is not editing? Message-ID:Date: 18 Aug 89 02:28:45 GMT References: <19115@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Image Processing Lab, Troy NY Lines: 20 In-reply-to: msw@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu's message of 14 Aug 89 01:13:09 GMT MSW> I have just recently begun using GNU Emacs and am very impressed. MSW> However, I am curious about a bit of philosophy that seems to be MSW> behind the emacs way of thought. MSW> In particular, emacs attempts to do everything. In some ways, this is MSW> nice; for example, the ability to reconfigure an editor to support MSW> LaTeX is useful. However, does an editor really need to know how to MSW> read mail, post news, run an Eliza session or establish a telnet MSW> connection? This seems to be counter to the Unix philosophy of ``a MSW> tool should do one job and do it well.'' In addition to the other things people have already said about emacs being a lisp interpreter, you should also note that emacs wasn't built around Unix originally. That's why the Unix interface can be a bit clunky at times. -- Rodney