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Of all the software in the world, #Emacs has been the greatest source of inspiration for #GRASP

I sometimes try to conclude what exactly Emacs is. As a matter of fact, the accidental interview that I made with Bernard Greenberg earlier this year happened exactly because I was trying to make a youtube video about "the concept of Emacs". I haven't finished the video - and I don't know if I ever will, so I decided to write this post.

The two obvious non-answers about the essence of Emacs are are "text editor" and "opearting system", and the closest conceptual relatives are Smalltalk virtual machines.

Emacs didn't begin with Lisp. It began with TECO, and it was MIT students' attempt at creating a working environment that wouldn't take away any power from its users, but that would instead empower them even more.

The Emacs paper by Richard Stallman refers, among others, to Doug Englebart's NLS/Augment system.

In either case, it seems that Emacs was as much a social movement as it was a text editor.

The early offspring of Emacs were Eine (which wasn't Emacs) and Zwei (which was Eine initially) for Lisp Machines and Multics Emacs (which was an Emacs).

Greenberg told me that he was a very close friend with Daniel Weinreb, and that they were inspiring each other's work. (He also told me he didn't know Richard Stallman very well.)

In either case, Multics Emacs was the first Emacs to use Lisp, and Stallman loved that idea.

The only Emacs that I had an opportunity to use was (and constantly is) GNU Emacs, which Stallman took from Gosling and modified. Gosling was a former user of Multics Emacs, and once he was confined to UNIX, he missed it so much that he decided to recreate it.

Of course, UNIX already had its editor (developed by Bill Joy) which was called "ex", as an extension to the "ed" editor developed by Ken Thompson. There was a way of running it in "visual mode" in video terminals (as opposed to teleltypes) by using the command "vi". I don't know whether Gosling didn't like it, or loved Emacs so much, but he created a crippled implementation of a Lisp-like language called "MockLisp", to mimic some of the capabilities of Multics Emacs.

(Guy Steele, who originally started the TECO Emacs project, was later serving on a scientific board for Gosling's PhD at CMU)

This is a very twisted story, and it's hard to get a clear-cut idea of what "the essence of Emacs", so...

so maybe you can tell me?