Emacs as an operating system?

Question

Currently using Awesome WM and it works pretty well for what I need. However, I have read several posts where people say, "Emacs is the best operating system!" Now having very little knowledge about Emacs it is difficult to tell if they are speaking literally or figuratively. So my question is can Emacs serve as a window manager/operation system or is it merely a highly configurable text editor that runs within a window?

Answer 1

ewaller wrote:
drcouzelis wrote:What with having a built in terminal emulator, it's possible to run EMACS in EMACS!
The emacs shell  wrote:$ emacs -nw
emacs: Terminal type "dumb" is not powerful enough to run Emacs.
It lacks the ability to position the cursor.
If that is not the actual type of terminal you have,
use the Bourne shell command `TERM=... export TERM' (C-shell:
`setenv TERM ...') to specify the correct type.  It may be necessary
to do `unset TERMINFO' (C-shell: `unsetenv TERMINFO') as well.
$
But, you can run emacs without the -nw from the shell, but it spawns a new emacs window.
"shell" is not the only terminal you have.  There are also "eshell" and "term" ("ansi-term").  All three have their advantages and disadvantages.
And you can run emacs or vim inside emacs using "M-x term".
As for me, i use emacs:
for reading mail and news (with Gnus),
for chat (there are several IRC clients for emacs),
for listening to music including online radio (with EMMS as a frontend and mplayer as a backend; you can also watch videos like that),
for configuring programming WM i use (StumpWM) on the fly (with SLIME),
for working with files (using dired and Surnise Commander),
as a super-inteface for git (Magit),
for Org mode,
even for reading web-pages when i'm only interested in content and not fancy appearance (with w3m; there is also eww),
for having fun by using elisp for extending emacs for my needs,
and for working with text in any kind.
And i think i didn't mention many things i use and a lot of things i don't use.
Last edited by alezost (2013-12-12 10:03:27)