Comment by pecg

I know that from a technical point of view, Emacs is not just a text editor; I think it is a complete lisp virtual machine with a text-based interface that happens to be prepared for editing text by default, and thus it should be treated as such, instead of running it over as a userland program maybe one day it works as a standalone operating system, with its own kernel and JIT compiled lisp dialect. I'm saying this, because when I first started using Unix-like operating systems Emacs was one of the things that attracted me the most, but after actively using it for almost a year I saw how it moved away from the expected operation mode of a typical Unix environment, and I didn't like that. I came to appreciate the phylosophy of "One program to do one thing and do it well... make programs that work together", I consider it an elegant way to design and implement software, thus I don't see where Emacs fits on a Unix-like system. In the end, I ditched it in favor of something much more simple, fast and adecuate, this is where vis does an outstanding job, having the unique plus of using a structural regular expressions engine, and extensible using Lua. vis is small (source code and binary) and I don't have to think about what SSL implementation it should use, because there is a system library that does it for me, since vis is just a text editor, and succeeds at it.