How would RMS name emacs, if it was created today?

There is a long discussion going on in the emacs-devel mailing list about renaming eglot. I am seeing various contradicting arguments from senior people... legends. So I am just curious what would be the name of the Emacs editor if it was created today. "Code Editor"? or if GNU was founded already then "GNU Code Editor" or GCE?

The word "Code" in "Code Editor" seems unnecessarily limiting. (I mean, "Editor" too, but you gotta keep that to orient people a bit.)

GNU Lisp Environment/Editor ? also if it were created today it'd probably be extensible in Guile which is a lisp-1 which changes the optimization culture. And it wouldn't be a big deal because other editors would have sprang up instead of GNU Emacs. Maybe we'd have seen a Vi implementation with embedded lisp. Or a word processor would have gradually morphed to fill the niche. Either way, there would be no Emacs to compare it to. Imagine a world with no doorknobs. How would the inventor name the doorknob, if it was created today?

Emacs originates from "editor macros". I honestly cannot come up with a better name.

For those who don't follow emails, what's wrong with Eglot?

Wasn't emacs named after an icecream place? That's my pet theory anyway, heard it somewhere.

Ask the man himself, not us.

> Imagine a world with no doorknobs. How would the inventor name the doorknob, if it was created today? In this hypothetical do doors and knobs exist already?

When you read the name "eglot" without any context, you cannot figure out it is. IOW, the name is not self-descriptive enough.

> "GNU Code Editor" or GCE? That name is based on a very narrow understanding of what Emacs is and the vast number of different things it is used for... editing code is just the tip of the iceberg. Old school unix folken like names that are terse (don't take long to type) and follow naming traditions based on names of projects that they were influenced by. They also like cheesy puns that can make you cringe and a fair dose of geek humor. I count myself to be part of that long and venerable tradition. EMACS is an acronym for "Editor MACroS" which followed a naming tradition of other editors including TECMAC and TMACS. And don't forget that XeMacs continued this tradition when it was forked from Emacs, not to mention the more recent RMacs project for porting Emacs to Rust. And don't forget that the tagline for Emacs is "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor." Perhaps "display" is a bit dated but the rest is still a very good description of what Emacs is. I would keep "real-time" since you can update the code base of Emacs while you are running Emacs simply by evaluating an s-expression. I would imagine RMS would still come up with something along the same lines...

> GNU Lisp Environment/Editor ? Acronym: **GLEE** :D

You're telling me the merging of Eglot into Emacs is being slowed down because "E" + "glot" doesn't not compute for Emacs contributors? Have they heard of `hippie-exp`? Or does the confusion come from the fact that the language semantic with "glot" can refer to both programming languages and communication languages?

Wait until you hear about what happened when plz was submitted... >Or does the confusion come from the fact that the language semantic with "glot" can refer to both programming languages and communication languages? I very much wish this was the case. I didn't follow the thread for obvious reasons so I might as well be wrong.

He'd probably call it Emacs, since it was based on the original Emacs by David Moon and Guy L. Steele. Unless he could think of a clever pun on the name (the way Gnu Bison is based on Unix yacc).

He'd probably call it Emacs, since it was based on the original Emacs by David Moon and Guy L. Steele. Unless he could think of a clever pun on the name (the way Gnu Bison is based on Unix yacc).

subr.el would like a word.

iMacs? ok i’m out

"Parse Code" - what a punchline. I don't envy emacs contributors at all.

Emacs personified by RMS remains the bookish protagonist in *Lucas* (1986) whose efforts to gain popularity only obscure and vitiate his strengths. More discoverable naming falls under the same populist rubric as RMS's designs for emacs to become a wysiwig word processor. He's still fighting the battle of the 1990s when also-rans like Sun and DEC tried and failed to catch up with Microsoft's point-and-click dominance. Cryptic naming is less a tradition than a congenital condition of command line interfaces like UNIX and its microcosm emacs. Some might perceive it a feature, not a bug, since domain-squatting a generic name like "ed" would lure novices to an inferior editor. So my advice to RMS is to lean into bad naming and fixed width fonts, and like Corey Haim, find companionship in the gender fluid Winona Ryder character who is well represented in the emacs community.

This is the correct answer. Also, `rms` isn't shallow this way and probably wouldn't change the name. I've been around computers since the 1980s (before the Internet!), and very much love old lore and tradition. But I look forward to using VS Neomacs IntelliCode—it will be sublime!

GNU Wurd.

Following the same tradition, eglot was named. It is a short form of Emacs Polyglot. Polyglot because it can support multiple programming languages using the language server protocol. But it seems that there is too much debate on this name.

For what it's worth, two of the maintainers (Lars and Eli) have said the name is not being changed. The discussion is happening anyway, but Eli has refused to delay the merge on the basis of the name, despite urgings from RMS.

Emack & Bolio's (https://emackandbolios.com/) Still in Cambridge and Boston. Good ice cream and smoothies. And while there was a shop near MIT in the day, it was not the source of the name. There is an Emacs history on the EmacsWiki https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory

As I understand it, when Lisp with macros was introduced, it was called "MacLisp". In that tradition, I would call Emacs "BEMLisp" or "Buffer Editing Macro Lisp." Or maybe "BEMacLisp". In the manual I'd explain that it is intended to be aliased to the "edit" command.

Ah, thank you for that. I had forgotten about polyglot. And if you know that, then the name is descriptive...

reading thru the thread comforts me my admiration for lars to make proper and sane decision for the emacs community : https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-10/msg00082.html

But even when this descriptive and following the same hacker fun tradition, it is still discomforting the elders who used similar names in the past.

I am a fan too. 🫡

To be fair, MAC stood for the MAC project at MIT >the Project on Mathematics and Computation, later backronymed to Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer I tried to research the introduction of macros but it was a bit more complicated; I find them introduced first in a memo in 1963 (3 years before MacLisp) I believe, but not sure if they were implemented yet as I also found mention of them first being in Maclisp (but not in a good source exactly, and it was only a throwaway comment). Finally, in my earlier source I see them being mention first used in lisp for the Q-32 system, which brings up Lisp 1.5 when I search it up (however, is that the only lisp for that system? Granted, they didn't say Maclisp nonetheless so it might not matter)

Thank you, interesting

No idea what the internal machinations of RMS would produce, but I'm fond of "glerp" - GNU Lisp Editor/Evaluator, Reader, Printer - solely because it'd be funnier for people to have to say.

Gnurple sounds good 😁

I actually much preferred one the suggested alternatives: emacs-very-bueno

Emacs has a lot of weird phrases. Eglot is just one example, not prominent one. Same complaint would apply to tramp, ido, speedbar, xref, eldoc, vc, flymake, frame vs window, yank, and miscellaneous other things.

subr = subroutines. Makes perfect sense to me.

The later terms you quote were established much before the common terms came to life, its not fruitful to argue about them. Vc, xref, eldoc, flymake all make perfect sense IMO.

How about Maced (as in the protection spray) MACro EDitor. There will be 100's of answer of course. But not many from someone like me who is older than RMS. :)

not a bad name if it comes before Emacs