Evolutionary Emacs
My favorite Emacs anecdote? A friend of mine and I were once working extremely long hours on a port of an operating system to a machine far too small to hold the operating system. We were spending 12 and 16 hours a day, seven days a week at this. We weren't being paid for the privilege of this labor. This should tell you something about our state of mind at the time. While walking to lunch one day we were berating GNU Emacs for it's kitchen sink (more like garbage pail) nature and insane size. I popped out with the quote Emacs was nearly three times the size of the UNIX kernel, but was capable of all these weird things like editing binaries. My friend, who was working on the disk buffer cache code of our operating system at the time, suddenly went non-linear. He started raving about how we could ``do a stand alone emacs ... we could graft the device drivers underneath, it's already got a buffering mechanism ...'' and went on like this for several minutes. At first we were amused but then became concerned when it appeared that he was serious. Finally after running on for a while with his brain storm he stopped and then added ``... and then we could distribute it ...'' at which point we started threatening violence, but he went on before we could get very far and said ``... and after it was out for a few months, we could go out and find everyone who was using it and kill them. We could be responsible for more progress in human evolution than any other event in human history ...'' We were confused at first, but then we suddenly saw the light that he was seeing and we saw that it was good. We're still waiting for someone to implement the stand alone Emacs. We've set up all the distribution and follow up channels. We figure it's only a matter of time now ...