Could Emacs be rewritten in Python?

[Alexander Schmolck]

Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> writes:
> I came to appreciate Emacs more when I looked at THE
> http://humane.sf.net/the/ -- an editor made by Jef Raskin, former Mac
> interface designer.  The interface he describes, without realizing it,
> is Emacs, and THE is just a poor implementation of Emacs.  

He certainly knows about Emacs (have a look at the index of his book), but I
guess obtaining patents and attracting attention as some sort of visionary is
unnecessarily complicated by pointing out the prior art yourself. And although
the most crucial (and brilliant) idea, incremental search, is nicked (and
uncredited on his webpage), the quasi-modal character (i.e. that you have to
keep the search key pressed) of LEAP (tm, patented and what have you) seems
like an actual difference -- you don't have to press return/C-g/movement
commands to get out of it, which I would guess (I haven't tried it -- no mac)
makes it more natural for moving in text (it also places the cursor at the
beginning of the match, I think, which seems similarly useful for moving
around).

> Now, I'm not saying Emacs couldn't be improved.  But it's a far, far
> better starting point that "modern" text editors.  I'm thoroughly
> convinced that modality is the superior interface for most situations,
> and I think GUIs are leaning more in that direction as time goes on.  I
> think this is why vi remains popular -- even though I personally don't
> like it -- because it's modal.  At least anything that's keyboard
> friendly should be modal, and a text editor that isn't keyboard friendly
> is clearly stupid.

Huh?

> 
> But I'd still like a Python Emacs to make experimentation with UI
> possible.  It would also be neat if it could be an environment for
> application development, like Emacs is, like THE wants to be... Oberon
> was like this too, and while I didn't like many parts of Oberon, the
> overall environment was really neat.  Squeak keeps trying to move this
> way too. 

Squeak also happens to sport an UI element whose usefulness seems incredibly
obvious to me but which I haven't seen anywhere else (exchanging contents of
current and prior selection).

alex