Some interesting insights on early Emacs in these annotated emails from Guy L Steele: https://gist.github.com/lispm/8c6783be2f5a3d41b7592ba3b2c453ea
The name was picked in 1976, and a number of concepts that still exist today were created! It mentions the kill ring, yanking, and even the same keybindings for them!
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One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere? I miss it in VS Code, where e.g. all the Fn keys are already assigned.
Today I learnt that Emacs 28 shipped a context-menu-mode! https://oylenshpeegul.gitlab.io/blog/posts/20230129/
This seems quintessentially Emacs: deeply hackable, but building UI features in an order very different to the mainstream.
`init` feels like an unhelpful name in OO. It doesn't give you an initial value, it initialises the instance that has already been created. Developers are often surprised that init doesn't return the instance, because they have a strong association with `new Foo()`.
Perhaps `finish` would have been a less confusing name?