Re: Emacs is very special regarding UIs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Mario Lang wrote:
> Emacs works with graphical toolkits on all major platforms, but also
> offers a almost-feature-complete text interface.

Emacs is a manifestation of the ITS user interfaces.  They all relied on
text because that's all that was available back then.  They also used
control characters, Altmode/Escape/Meta, and prefix arguments.

> I am seeing Emacs as a platform to write "apps" in Emacs Lisp.

In this sense, Emacs is a Lisp machine.  Not surprisingly, those came
from the same place as ITS: the MIT AI Lab.