1.1 Vision

Emacs has been extended to do much more than text editing. It can get your email, run a chat client, do video editing², and more. For some the prospect of chatting from within one’s text editor sounds weird. Why would anyone want to do that? Because Emacs gives them so much control. Frustrated by a particular piece of functionality? Disable it. Unhappy with some unintuitive key binding? Change it. Unimpressed by built-in functionality? Rewrite it. And you can do all that while Emacs is running. You don’t have to exit and recompile.

The purpose of Emacsy is to bring the Emacs way of doing things to other applications natively. In my mind, I imagine Emacs consuming applications from the outside, while Emacsy combines with applications from the inside—thereby allowing an application to be Emacs-like without requiring it to use Emacs as its frontend. I would like to hit \verb|M-x| in other applications to run commands. I would like to see authors introduce a new version: “Version 3.0, now extendable with Emacsy.” I would like hear power users ask, “Yes, but is it Emacsy?”