Saturday, June 12, 2010

REST & the next Emacs

Quick thought: the next Emacs should probably spawn a new process for each buffer (like Chrome). (This also means that Emacs' buffer-local variables are trivially implementable as dynamic variables.)

Buffers should only be accessed through a RESTish protocol, with a couple of verbs.

And of course, we gotta drop plain text and the file system, and switch to a 2D-visualizable hypermedia/hypercode format, stored in a hyperdatabase.

But, and that's important, the rest has to stay the same. The good stuff.

1 comment:

Andrew said...

I've been thinking about what I want in a new text editor (I'm an emacs user), and I think what I want, is a WebKit powered, freestanding editor with native support for HTML/CSS/Scheme for extending. It'd actually be really cool if commands were compiled into a JITed prescheme so that you could write your own extension languages (not just macros) like JavaScript and other easily compiled languages.

My one problem of course is that I'd also love to have a terminal based editor, and relying on HTML/CSS makes that a bit more difficult.