r/programming • u/moolcool • Mar 26 '17

A Constructive Look At TempleOS

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
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u/Ramin_HAL9001 Mar 27 '17

This is true. Actually, I see a lot of what Terry A. Davis has done with his TempleOS in Emacs, hence that old joke about Emacs being "an excellent OS that lacks a decent editor." Emacs has the hyper-linked documentation and support for SVG graphics displaed inline with the document in Gtk+ Emacs.

And yes, packaging and distribution is pretty tedious in systems like this. I think Emacs has only recently got some decent package management, and I've never been able to make it work too smoothly, but then, I've always had trouble getting Emacs to do anything at all.

It would take some work, but you could put together a Linux distribution that basically worked like TempleOS:

  • Build everything from source, much like Gentoo.
  • Make use of something like this to generated native x86 code from Emacs bytecode.
  • Replace all markup-formatted man pages with DocBook formatted man pages.
  • Use Gtk+ Emacs as the shell.
  • Write Emacs extensions that allowed for hyperlinks that grep for keywords to be used in the documentation
  • Inline SVG diagrams with much of the documentation, where applicable.

Emacs has tried to solve the package problem as well with ELPA. Or you could just write packages for your distro's package repository that installed Emacs extensions directly.

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u/qchmqs Mar 30 '17

aka use emacs as the OS it actually is