Over at the Emacs sub-reddit, yep808 says that he thinks of Emacs not as an editor but as an editor framework that allows you to build the editor you really want. He asks if others share this view. It is, of course, a widely held perspective but as Irreal oldtimers know, not one that I think is precisely accurate.

My view is neatly captured by rhabarba’s comment which posits that, “GNU Emacs is a Lisp machine emulator which can (but does not have to) start a text editor application by default.” I’ve long held that the real power of Emacs comes from that fact: that Emacs is, in fact, a light-weight Lisp Machine.

Sadly, it’s nowhere nearly as powerful (a software system) as the original Lisp Machines but it does allow us to do all sorts of non-editing things like using it as an RSS reader, or music player, or Email client, or any number of other things. And, of course, we can easily build our own applications in Emacs Lisp.

It might seem as if it doesn’t matter how you view Emacs but I believe thinking of it as a Lisp Machine has a definite benefit: it encourages the view that Emacs is a programmable environment in which you can build all sorts of applications that are only peripherally, if at all, related to text editing. Once you adopt that point of view, you can start really tapping into the power of Emacs by writing code to solve your own problems.