GNU Emacs (Beautiful Architecture - Chapter 11)

Emacs has been described as antiquated, unimpressive, and down right repulsive. And those were just the comments overheard in a small group of software engineers working in the same common area. Yes, I am guilty of being one of many of those critics. The majority of the complaints from coworkers who did not want to devote the necessary time to learn keystrokes features of another editor. The vi editor and nedit were sufficient applications that were commonly installed across most of our platforms and adequately known by most of the developers.

As far as I can recall, there was mainly one software engineer out of approximately twenty-five that used Emacs religiously and proclaimed it as gospel. Maybe it had something to do with being from Oklahoma and living in Texas. Whatever the case, he did know how to use the features very well and created a class navigation macro or primitive very similar to drilling down into classes and subclasses in the Eclipse IDE.

Emac's architecture follows the widely used Model-View-Controller pattern for interactive applications and is written almost entirely in Lisp. Before reading this chapter, I can honestly say have never looked at Lisp code. Now I know why. Maybe it is the way Pascal, C++, and Java have been spoon fed to me over the years, writing applications for Emacs does not appear to be the most exciting task to complete.

Emacs developed a hierarchy of update strategies ranging from the quick-but-limited to the more-work-but-exhaustive. Emacs determined which algorithms to use based on the speed of the terminal and the communication connection. I will give Emacs the benefit of the doubt and say that was a pretty impressive idea. I doubt you will find many of today's modern systems willing to gamble and take that much consideration into their logic. Most systems today submit a minimum CPU or memory requirement that will not provide a bottleneck and degrade usability.

Unlike wine, I am convinced Emacs does not get better with age. There are so many other options available in the community. I think Emacs will always get the bad wrap of just being an over-hyped, bloated text editor. Maybe I am pessimistic, but I do not see Emacs becoming the tool of choice even if has been around for 20+ years.