Why bring new features to Emacs and not Emacs to new applications? (was: Emacs as word processor)

[Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I normally only lurk around on the mailing list. However, this
discussion reminded me very much about some ideas/thoughts I had every
now and then.

First emacs is poweful and feature rich. If you got used to it, its
hard to use any other editor.

Secondly, some other projects try to mimic emacs already. Take
eclipse, which has an emacs-mode plug-in, firefox has an emacs
plug-in, etc.
Most of those mimic the most common keyboard shortcuts to make emacs
users feel home.

So instead of creating just emacs mode or core feature to emacs, why
not make sure others can embedded a real emacs session within there
application?

Take the example above, eclipse does a nice project management job
(never got warm with emacs sidebar and cedet). Now combine this with
emacs as an editor.
There are so many IDEs out there for so many different purposes, who
just miss a good editor. Same might be true for many other programs
and applications.

Thus, if there would exsist something like a emacs widget for the
usual GUI toolkits or an emacs library which gives all the power of
emacs to other applications, one could think of a e.g. a
libre-office-emacs office suite. A thunderbird-emacs mailer or
something as small as a emacs-arduino IDE.

Just my two (non-developer) cents...

Torwag