Very cool story thank you. I still use ielm regularly.

What do you mean by "richer ecosystem"? Have you ever seen GitHub language stats - there's so much Elisp on GitHub alone, it's absolute bananas. The amount of Elisp in the wild probably surpasses the amount of Clojure, CL and Racket combined. And mind that it isn't "a general use" PL - it exists for one and single purpose.

Lem is great and I'm happy there's finally something out there to challenge Emacs' hegemony, yet pragmatically, unless someone builds a way to run Elisp in Lem, it's unlikely to overthrow Emacs anytime soon, and that's just not gonna happen.

Org-mode, Magit, and thousands of packages aren't just "Elisp code" - they depend on Emacs' specific buffer model, text properties, overlays, markers, the display engine, process handling, and countless quirks packages rely on (intentionally or not). A Lem Elisp interpreter that didn't also reimplement all of that faithfully would run trivial `.el` files and choke on anything real. At that point you've reimplemented Emacs inside Lem.

Elisp is not the biggest point here and Neovim proves that with pivoting to Lua; the crux is the runtime and the corpus, and reimplementing those is the actual mountain. That is real ecosystem for whatever reason you're choosing to simply ignore.

Having CommonLisp as the extension language would indeed be a great improvement over Elisp.

However, I am suspicious about the dependency of Lem on Webkit, which for me is rather associated with inefficiency and low performance than with the instant reactions that I expect from programming text editors, terminal emulators and tiled window managers.

The main problem is that it is very difficult for any replacement of Emacs to offer everything that already exists for Emacs.

In my opinion, the only way in which such a replacement would succeed would be if it would include an automatic translator from Elisp to CommonLisp scripts executable by it, with equivalent functionality.

I am not sure if I would bet one way or another on who has the richer ecosystem here.. They are both great. I would probably wager elpa has more packages in general than quicklisp, but maybe not necessarily richer/higher quality.

"Common Lisp Emacs" has been attempted a few times. Lem seems like the best effort yet, and I was really excited about it until they decided to adopt a webview renderer.

I've got vscode for that.

I chose the JS ecosystem. Why does the power of Emacs not belong in the browser? These days JS is a powerful enough FP language to do it.

I think his secondary point is to show the potential. His primary point is likely that if you set this all up for home use, you can use mostly the same config to use it at work. This way, when you go home or go to work, you're dealing with the same environment and workflows.

Maybe he is a freelancer or a business owner and not an employee. If you’re one of the former, there’s often little separation between work and personal. I only truly enforce separation when I’m an employee, with different devices for each context.

Many people that do this are almost certainly freelance contractors in some facility?

Probably, though, many are just using personal as not strictly personal, but the kind of personal things you might do while at a desk job.

I assume it was not to use same profile but the same environment of all text related tasks. Like I write blogs and research papers in org mode, and then simply export the necessary file format. I can perform text operations easily in mail, i can have elisp snippets generate mail for me depending on the sender, I can use calc to add numbers inside the buffer, I can have latex previews.

> This has always been my problem with adopting Emacs or Obsidian

That's an orthogonal problem. It's almost trivial to set up Org-mode so all your personal notes are always encrypted on disk.

You don't have to combine work and personal stuff in Emacs. You can for example set it up to just connect to work email and work jira and work slack and work clankers etc.

If the "super app" is modular - like Emacs is - you basically get the best of both worlds.

And building a consistent good experience from isolated tools is even harder. The problem is just hard and I think good criteria with the super app approach is the way to go.

I really like Spacemacs. It's discoverable, extendable, quite consistent.

The author defines it:

> Like an electronics breadboard, a board where every module you plug in shares a bus with all the others, except here the modules are written in Lisp.

The bit about the browser seems to simply be a strained metaphor: "The browser is a rented Lispboard, with a landlord. Emacs is the only one you can own."