Porting Emacs Editor to HelenOS

[bluesky]

Details
Emacs text editor is very extensible and customizable text editor. It supports a range of features from word processing, program development to rss reader. In background it uses Emacs Lisp interpreter to execute all functions implemented as Emacs lisp scripts. We are trying to port Emacs text editor to HelenOS. Firstly we will try to port the terminal version with minimal functionality and then we will try to add functionality to it.

What Gains and Benefits will this bring?
Currently HelenOS has "edit" as simple text editor. As much as HelenOS is moving towards becoming self-hosting, it will need some utility for writing code, publishing documentation etc. Emacs Text Editor is a great option for this purpose.

Difficulty
Medium to Hard

Required Skills
Programming in the C, Python, Emacs Lisp languages.
Working Experience in non-POSIX environment.

[Jakub Jermář]

Removing this ticket from the 0.5.1 milestone and mainline version.

I was also wondering whether the submitter is well aware of the scope of this endeavor. My particular concern here would be the amount of Emacs dependencies that would have to be ported to and maintained in HelenOS.

I am also not convinced about the usefulness of Emacs in HelenOS. Using edit to edit source files is quite easy and I believe it will be easier to enhance and maintain edit rather than committing to support Emacs and its dependencies. There is also no point in porting all the non-essential GNU software to HelenOS as our goal is not to make a better GNU than GNU itself.

Having said that, I am perfectly okay with someone working on this ticket for the training's sake, but the prospect of having Emacs integrated into HelenOS and maintaining it there seems quite low.

Btw, why don't you guys write to the ML first? It's much more comfortable to talk about the HelenOS project priorities there than om a comment section of a ticket.

[Vojtech Horky]

I do not think that Python is needed and, strictly speaking, native GCC is not needed as well as it shall be possible to cross-compile all the dependencies.

[bluesky]

Replying to vhotspur:

I do not think that Python is needed …

We are trying to compile Emacs using GCC cross compiler only. Although Emacs has LISP dependencies as most of the features are implemented as dynamically loadable LISP scripts, and we are not able to figure out how to handle them yet. We will appreciate any kind of suggestions in this regard. Moreover about python, some scripts included in Emacs source code are written in python, that's why added 'porting python' section with this link. Although thanks for the information.

[Jakub Jermář]

Closing as will-not-fix. There is no demand for this functionality and the ticket is not being worked on anyway.