> > Things you can't do in Emacs that feel as if they *should* be practical, > even though they currently are not > > - Web browsing with ease, and with a full list of currently-expected > features (i.e. features to make the general public say "Wow! This is > much better than Firefox! I'm switching to this for banking, and for > everything else as well!" - not "Umm, why does it look like > this?"). This single (admittedly huge) feature, probably along with > the next one, are IMO the "killer features" that Emacs does not have. > > - Ability to continue working in other buffers when one buffer is > busy. Combine this feature and the one mentioned above, and I (perhaps > along with a lot of other people) move from two primary every-day > applications down to one. >
I can sympathize with these first two points. Until the symbolics lisp machine is resurrected and we return to a world of parens and turtles all the way down, I've resigned myself to living in a mixed lisp/unix environment. That said, I've been able to cobble together an interface which very closely approximates an Emacs operating system. 1. A tiling window manager (I personally use xmonad [1]). This lets you navigate all of your windows as if they were Emacs buffers, and allows one to go hours using multiple applications without having to use a mouse. 2. Conkeror [2], a web browser built on the same code base as Firefox, which makes web browsing as Emacs-like as possible (e.g., tabs are buffers, and most of the main key chords are the same). The major component my desktop is missing is a system-wide kill ring. I've used tools which purport to provide this, but have yet to find one that works the way I want it to. Cheers, Footnotes: [1] http://xmonad.org [2] http://conkeror.org/ -- Eric Schulte http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte