This is Yet Another Example of the amazing utility of being able to easily and stably extend one's environment. emacs is just a text editor, but this project is changing it into a Stack Exchange client. That's useful!
Emacs certainly is not just a text editor. Emacs is just a big REPL, a REPL with a powerful text editor instead of minimal command line interface. Right on the homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/, it is written that:
"GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing."
Text editing is a subset of Emacs and Emacs Lisp, not the other way around.
No it's not. It is really a big REPL optimized for text processing. You compare Emacs to the like of Python, not just some random editor. Unlike other editors that have an optional extension language, if you remove Emacs Lisp, effective you remove Emacs. Even file opening is written in Emacs Lisp.
Dude, I get what you're saying, but you're like a guy who comments on a Facebook picture of a newborn with 'The reason you think he's cute is purely evolutionary.'
Yes, of course emacs is a big REPL optimised text processing. But it's optimised for text processing because…it started out as a text editor.
The whole point of what I wrote is that emacs started out as a simple text editor (yes, I'm aware that its origin was as text editing macros for TECO) and due to its extensibility it can and has become so much more.
Really, I think you got way too hung up on the word 'just.'
We both love emacs. We both love having a fully-extensible text editing environment.
I just wanted to clarify in case someone read your comments and have a wrong impression that Emacs is a text editor like Vim. Nothing more, nothing less.
I build something similar for Atom a few months ago[1] and while some people liked the idea a lot of comments were negative and turned around that fact that programming is not about copy/pasting and plagiarism. Now a similar project is built but for emacs and comments about the concept of having a client inside an editor is interesting and powerful.
