nov.el VS GNU Emacs

bddean's ereader and nov.el look appealing, especially with nov-xwidget.el for formatting on the latter.

I'm one of those weird users who works in both, and I've also never really understood the need to pick a side. I initially used emacs for years, and now I've used both for years. I also don't pick a side in the tea and coffee debate, sometimes I want rooibos and others espresso.

Admittedly, my emacs usage at this point is largely to treat it as a collection of distinct apps; fire up in nov-mode¹ mode to read books, fire up in magit-status² to mangle git repository, etc. It really feels like there are a collection of best of breed apps that just happen to built on emacs as a toolkit, most of which are fully functional without buying in to emacs for life(not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with that).

The only time I really use it as an actual editing tool is when I'm working on documentation, and that is largely because I like being able to see inline screenshots in that instance.

¹ https://github.com/wasamasa/nov.el

² https://magit.vc/

It has been considered and rejected due to the inherent complexity: https://github.com/wasamasa/nov.el/issues/4

gnu.org - contains everything you need to research his philosophy.

stallman.org - personal website, contains a lot of opinion, but I absolutely respect this man in all what he says.

emacs.org (redirects to https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) - his non-philosophical work, one of two mainstream console text editors.

Forever, there was a file included in stock Emacs, `spook.el`, which could be hooked up to automatically add random strings of "interesting" keywords to each of your email or Usenet messages (in signatures, or in headers like `X-Spook`).

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

Looks like copyright date of 1988:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/play/...

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/spook....

Try `M-x spook RET` in an Emacs buffer.

If you want to spare a couple of detours, you probably could start with Emacs Org-mode according to Greenspun's eleventh rule: "Any sufficiently complicated PIM or note-taking program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org mode."

Emacs: winget install GNU.Emacs

The whole cl-lib thing is a total disaster:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/emacs...

They added cl- as a prefix to each Common Lisp symbol.

FIRST is now called cl-first, CAAAR is now cl-caaar .

I would really prefer if GNU Emacs removes all Common Lisp functionality, instead of creating this really wacky stuff, with discussions about this topic every year.

Never too late to try! Take your time. Emacs will outlive us all. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

GNU Emacs is a versatile, open-source text editor that offers extensibility and customization—a sort of self-documenting real-time display editor. Our thanks for the suggestion go to CartanAnnullator.

Emacs

Their DEFUN and DEFVAR macros for example let us define a function or a variable that will be available as a Lisp function, and can be used as an ordinary C function from the C code. Emacs is written in pure C99 language and works with both GCC and Clang I believe. We can just define a C function via macro, and it is auto exported and made available to Lisp. For example my first patch to Emacs was for this function (we added "count" argument to make it possible to skip enumerating files in a directory for the case when user code is just interesting if a directory is empty or not):