this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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While I won't say that writing a text editor or rewriting (base) Emacs is easy, I think it is all about the ecosystem. There's lots of Emacs reimplementations out there, some really good ones (like Lem), but they all have the same shortcoming: "no org mode", "no magit", and so on.
Emacs has a truly enormous ecosystem and only a reimplementation that runs everything unchanged has a chance of attracting enough attention. There was a time that that was seen as a worthwhile venture: Elisp was limited and slow. However, now with CL compatibilty and native compilation, I don't see it happening. Not in the sense of something standing up that can and will actually replace Emacs.
Worse is better :-)