Emacs in the Cloud

[Paul Michael Reilly <pmr@pajato.com>]

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I recently tried out a ChromeBook for a month or so.  The attraction was
primarily the simplicity of the system.  I love the idea of not having to
deal directly with an underlying OS, not having to configure devices or
drivers, not having to do backups, not worrying about losing files, or
dealing with security, or having the hardware go belly up.  While the
experience was a mixed success (I returned the box since it was underpowered
and led to very poor Chrome behavior: slow and lots of crashed tabs and
extensions).  But most of all, life without Emacs, even for just short
periods, just plain sucks.

But a sufficiently powerful machine could provide a ChromeBook experience
and undoubtedly will as ChromeOS matures.  But it will not be in Google's
interest to provide a native Emacs experience which leads to the likelihood
of a ChromeOS derivative, if only to have a clean Emacs integration,
(possible but unlikely) or a Cloud based Emacs experience being developed.

Before I go on, I think I basically understand Richard's (and others) strong
anti-cloud stance: it is crazy to put sensitive data totally in the hands of
giant corporations. But there is usefulness in having cloud based
organizations provide infrastructure support (data preservation, replication
for accessibility, simple security) for information that is not highly
sensitive, like a music collection.  And there is usefulness in providing
access to sensitive data that is provided by Cloud based infrastructure that
is under one's own control (a personal server for example) or with third
party organizations that one does trust (FSF, FreeCDDB, etc.)

So if you buy the premise that there are circumstances where a Cloud based
machine makes sense, but you want to have an Emacs experience in that
environment, where does that Emacs experience come from?  A true Emacs
extension/plugin for Chrome?  An Emacs built with an embedded web server?  A
limited Emacs exposed by ChromeOS that supports the existing Emacs
extensions? An Emacs protocol supported by an Apache module?

My preference leans towards the embedded server and/or the Emacs protocol
approaches.  I have not been tracking this list for a few years so I don't
know if any of this has been discussed already (a browse of the archives did
not reveal anything "cloud" related.)  And I figured that if there is any
work going on of a related nature, this list would be aware of it and
provide pointers/references.

Thanks,

-pmr

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