The other night i was thinking about how modern emacs rewrite would work and what it would be. I was thinking why emacs is a single application and how to justify that in the modern day. I dont think emacs goes far enough for integration with the rest of the desktop and could go further. I came up with the idea that emacs should not be a text editor/program but a compositor.
Okay, hear me out…
The real strengh of emacs is the integration between multiple apps inside a single program. Having it be a compositor makes instant startup time (due to the compositor just opening a window) and lets it have full integration with external apps.
Now there is 2 ways to do something like this. The more vimy way would be to create a bunch of sockets and have things ask said sockets for “special” functions like window swallowing inside the app. The other(emacsy) way would to have these apps built into the compositor. I think this is probably easier to pull off but less modular.
So going into this idea the way emacs does it is by having a terminal based text area for multiple applications. The windowing would obviously be through the compositor but we have to edit text like emacs does. This is where the native apps come in. These apps would support the compositor and either be part of the compositors source code or able to talk to the socket which is read by the compositor. If we have it builtin to the source code we could just draw it, if it is socket based then we would have to use a different graphics api.
This will kinda be like a DE for power users with killer apps as opposed to easy ones. The interoperablity will also be insane. One thing would be seemlessly transitioning to native apps. 2 native apps would be a text editor and git interface. The way I imagine it is like magit and normal emacs editing. Inside the git interface you should be able to press enter on any of the files and see the native editor like in magit. While that isnt different from normal emacs we can do compositor specific stuff so global keybinds and controlling windows.
One of the nice things unique to a compositor would be to integrate a rofi/helm like interface. I love how visual studio code does its control-p where you can prefix it with > for a command etc. That would be great to have a default to open programs and ! for commands or > to open files or something.
The other imo nessisary component is a file manager. I am unsure how I think this should work but obviously it should have good integration with the git interface and the text editor. This may include project functions like stuff in projectile. I dont know whether it should be dual pane or if it should have search on by default like a fuzzy finder. Maybe this entire part is unessisary because of the existance of a robust search.