Emacs.NET???
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This week on DevSource we ran a news article that somebody at Microsoft is looking at building a .NET version of Emacs. This could potentially replace the Visual Studio IDE. In theory. Maybe? |
I suppose realistically, it could. If the editor is as extensible as the standard Emacs, then there's no reason a person couldn't use it and be as productive as Visual Studio. Combine it with something like an ant-based build tool, and you would have a pretty good development system. (Really, you already can do all that, since the compilers ship for free with the .NET runtime.)
But the biggest question is Will people actually use it? Or will this just be for the die-hards? The article that we ran has the deck line, "Unix/Linux technologies are finding their way onto .Net." That, of course, was written by our writers over at eWeek, and not by Microsoft. But if that is some of the thinking at Microsoft, then it probably won't work. There's a great divide between Unix-die-hards and Windows-die-hards, and people rarely cross over. However, when Unix people are forced to work on Windows, they might like some of their old, familiar tools. Emacs is, arguably, one such tool.
We'll see if it really catches on. I'm curious what your thoughts are.
