Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!bu-cs!buengc!art From: art@buengc.BU.EDU (A. R. Thompson) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Why does emacs do so much that is not editing? Message-ID: <3791@buengc.BU.EDU> Date: 16 Aug 89 17:38:54 GMT References: <19115@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu> Reply-To: art@buengc.bu.edu (A. R. Thompson) Followup-To: gnu.misc.discuss Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng. Lines: 21 In article <19115@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu> msw@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Matt S Wartell) writes: >I have just recently begun using GNU Emacs and am very impressed. >However, I am curious about a bit of philosophy that seems to be >behind the emacs way of thought. > >In particular, emacs attempts to do everything. In some ways, this is >nice; for example, the ability to reconfigure an editor to support >LaTeX is useful. However, does an editor really need to know how to >read mail, post news, run an Eliza session or establish a telnet >connection? This seems to be counter to the Unix philosophy of ``a >tool should do one job and do it well.'' > >Does GNU emacs do all of these `extra' tasks because it can, or is there >a compelling reason to do everything from within the editor? > >Please, do not read this as a criticism of the support packages that >come with emacs, but rather as a query regarding the Buddha nature (:-) >of emacs. Because in reality emacs is a lisp system that happens to have a lot of built in editing functions.