I've implemented three programmers' text editors in days gone by, two of which were inspired by Emacs. It's easy to improve on Emacs' architecture and implementation but that just guarantees that the new improved editor will languish in obscurity since it doesn't have the momentum of the official Emacs. An editor would have to be truly extraordinary (including it's collection of extensions) in order to win power users away from Gnu Emacs. Like many long-term Emacs users, I'm unwilling to give up its power and convenience despite having to hold my nose a lot!
If a Free Software reimplementation was fully compatible with Gnu Emacs at the Emacs Lisp level, it could also provide a superior architecture underneath for new code written nicer Racket languages. Unless and until the new editor wins over most of the users of the existing Gnu Emacs, it is critical to maintain backwards compatibility for traditional Emacs Lisp and the traditional API. Implementing Emacs Lisp presents a possibly interesting challenge to Racket's language framework. It may help that Emacs Lisp now supports lexical binding clearly signalled on a per-module basis. _Greg -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
