A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
“Many other editors imitate the EMACS command set and display updating philosophy without providing extensibility. Despite that deficiency, and despite the greatly reduced set of features that results from it, these can be useful editors, though not as useful as an extensible one. For a computer with a small address space or lacking virtual memory, this is probably the best that can be done.
“The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS, and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe that they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘Ersatz EMACS’.“
– Richard M. Stallman. EmacsTheExtensibleCustomizableSelfDocumentingDisplayEditor. MIT AI Memo 519a, 26 March 1981.
(I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a cat named Emacs, and have known RMS and used and programmed and developed display drivers and user interfaces for Emacs for a long long time.)
I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
Comments
The first emacs I used at SUNY Stony Brook circa 1989 and pretty much the last. Vi for me
Technically and officially, JOVE is only an "Ersatz Emacs" because it lacks an extension language, and is merely a "nonextensible imitation" of Emacs.
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErsatzEmacs
ErsatzEmacs
A ‘nonextensible imitation’ of a supposed implementation of an Emacs; by authoritative definition in RichardStallman’s 1981 publication, ‘EMACS: the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor’, such a product is a contradiction in terms, a literal absurdity.
“Many other editors imitate the EMACS command set and display updating philosophy without providing extensibility. Despite that deficiency, and despite the greatly reduced set of features that results from it, these can be useful editors, though not as useful as an extensible one. For a computer with a small address space or lacking virtual memory, this is probably the best that can be done.
“The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an unfortunate confusing effect: their users, knowing that they are using an imitation of EMACS, and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe that they are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘Ersatz EMACS’.“
– Richard M. Stallman. EmacsTheExtensibleCustomizableSelfDocumentingDisplayEditor. MIT AI Memo 519a, 26 March 1981.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
(I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a cat named Emacs, and have known RMS and used and programmed and developed display drivers and user interfaces for Emacs for a long long time.)
Nelson Spins Pip While Emacs Watches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139