It's the little changes that make you feel old

[jducoeur]

Emacs now has graphics in it. (Crappy graphics, to be sure, but pictures nonetheless.) Surely this is a sign of the end times...

Comments

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Why are graphics a sign of the end times?

[jducoeur]

Just that I think of emacs as so *definitively* text-oriented. It was still very text-y when the rest of the world was moving to graphical glitz...

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

To be honest, though, the graphics support in emacs is still pretty utilitarian. There's a lot less graphical "glitz" than there is "if emacs support for this feature didn't handle graphics, I would need to find some other program that does."

[jducoeur]

Ah -- part of the "Emacs is really an operating system in disguise" thing...

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

There's a bit of that, but for me the key would be e-mail. It's a thoroughly "text-y" application, but not being able to handle inline pictures would be a problem for me at this point.

The "operating system in disguise" idea is an increasingly minority view these days, primarily because Emacs is single-threaded. It does a lot of things, but the ones that aren't text-oriented are generally implemented by calling out to an external program -- in a separate task if appropriate.