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Date:Mon Sep 10 17:10:22 1993 
Subject:Re: How to end silly editor wars 
From:Stephen J Bevan 
Volume-ID:930911.01 

In article <CD56Mq.5LC@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk> pop@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Robin Popplestone) writes:
   [deleted]

   In fact, I would argue that editors should be unbundled into (a) buffer
   maintenance and (b) buffer presentation.

Agreed, I rambled on about this two years ago in comp.editors but
nobody seemed interested.  However, Rob Pike also had the same idea
and, instead of wasting time reading/posting news like me, he actually
implemented it in the form of "sam" (available in
anonymous@research.att.com:dist/sam).  The other thing I rambled on
about was making the buffer management and presentation facilities
into libraries that other tools can use e.g. why implement a subset of
the buffer handling facilities in a news or mail reader if the code is
already there in an editor library (of course in Emacs you don't
bother, you just write the whole thing in Elisp, fine if you like
Elisp, but if you don't ...)?  Anyway, it seems Pike has had a similar
idea and is working on "acme" which is a sort of editor environment.
BTW neither of these ideas is particularly new, I found references
going back to the 70s that discuss these things.  Maybe their time has
finally come.