In Emacs, everything looks like a service

mimo84

I have been using emacs for the past couple of years. Started because I wanted to try out org mode and stayed for the extreme flexibility it offers.

kandros

One of the pivotal moments in my career has been when I used Emacs just enough to truly understand what "Emacs is an operating system" means, not just as a joke but as something I could believe in

pjmlp

> A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel level. Only because Lisp Machines, or variations thereof didn't took off in the mainstream. "Symbolics Lisp Machine demo" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk "Emacs and Lisp" https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/emacs-and-lisp.html While Emacs was forked by Lucid as XEmacs to make one of the very first ideas of LSP, nowadays most features have been integrated back into Emacs https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html "Lucid Energize Demo" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

driva

It's a shell not an operating system but the concept of a shell isn't commonly understood.

girvel

I did not get this argument. Diagrams are nice, and I probably missed something in lisp code (not used to lisp syntax), but I see no argument that Emacs has more service-like interaction with other apps or its plugins than say vim or vscode. I agree that emacs is the most OS-like, but I would love if someone explained what exactly is the point in the article

floathub

Came across this recently, which I find is a good and short intro to Emacs for people who don't use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZDmO5yOxE

deng

This just proves that you can cram pretty much anything into the client/server dichotomy if you just define "client", "server" and "request" broad enough. Similarly, I remember how desperately people tried to argue that Emacs follows the "Unix philosophy" as long as your LISP functions are doing just one thing, and do them well. I don't know what you would gain from these things. Emacs follows the idea of LISP machines, I think that much anybody can agree on. From there, Emacs can be or do pretty much whatever you want. It's excellent in communicating with CLI tools - you can call that client/server if you want, but I wouldn't know what you'd gain from that definition. The reality is that Emacs has gone through a lot of fads and hypes over its decades of existence, and each time, it has taken something along the way. Heck, there's a whole semantic parsing engine buried within (CEDET), which nowadays is pretty much unused, because then LSPs came along, and now we have agents (which Emacs btw is a pretty decent frontend for).

bitwize

In Emacs, everything looks like a part of the core system. The whole thing is just one unvariegated blob of Lisp, which could be a strength or a weakness depending on your perspective. Me, I happen to like that sort of thing.

kleiba2

I've been an Emacs user for over 25 years. But last year I switched employers and they won't let me use it even for tasks where it would absolutely shine. Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point. Unfortunately, I failed to convince my employer to make everybody else switch to Emacs. So, now I'm using lots of one-purpose tools, one for each separate task, a good deal less efficiently than I could use Emacs, and I'm still learning all the new UIs and keyboard mappings.

agentultra

I learned a while ago that eMacs is more like a programming environment that has a text editor built in. Sort of like some SmallTalk images. When you think of it this way it’s pretty neat.

SoftTalker

Emacs itself can run as a client and server. To start the server: emacs --daemon Then use `emacsclient` to connect to it. All `emacsclient` instances whether in terminals or GUI are using the same server and can access the same open files and buffers. Unfortunately it only works locally. I've tried to forward the emacs server socket over ssh to a remote client and it doesn't work.

kickingvegas

OP here. This post resonated far more than expected. Thanks all for the feedback!

jhalloran

One thing that's easy to forget is how much of the "everything is a service" idea predates LSP. Emacs had long-running subprocesses, RPC-ish interactions, TRAMP, GUD, REPL integration, etc. LSP standardized one important interface, but it wasn't the beginning of the architecture.

GregDavidson

Emacs is a Platform . Operating Systems are also Platforms. Many other things are platforms. A platform is a layer of software designed to enable you to build new things on it. This should raise the question: What platform X would be good for building this thing Y I want to build? I often find X = Emacs, but also Racket, Rust, et al. An application which is also a good platform may be worth a greater learning investment than a simpler application would justify.