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Emacs is a highly sophisticated text editor, and much more besides.
Emacs contains an entire Lisp system inside it. It includes a Lisp interpreter, and most of its functionality is written in Lisp. For this reason Emacs is highly customizable and extensible--almost any part of its functionality can be modified, and additional functionality incorporated, by editing and/or writing Lisp code.
Though originally conceived as a program editor, Emacs has now evolved into something much bigger. It has been extended to provide many programming and general productivity features, such as facilities to run compilation subprocesses, and a complete integrated e-mail system.
The functionality of Emacs has been extended to the point that it now provides a very rich and complete environment for general purpose computing. In effect it has now become a complete user environment.
Many software professionals now do almost all their work inside Emacs. No longer just a program editor, it is now more accurate to refer to Emacs as an editor-based user environment.
Emacs remains largely the province of the sophisticated technical user. However it has the potential to become a much more widespread tool for sophisticated users everywhere.
As discussed in the article titled Libre Services: A non-proprietary model for delivery of Internet services, users interact with services via a user environment on their own computer. This is typically a web browser running under Windows.
The goal of this project is to establish Emacs as a complete user environment for interaction with Libre Services. We call this the Emacs Office Environment, or EOE.
All computer users require a basic set of office services and productivity tools. These office services includes such things as e-mail, time management tools, on-line dictionary, thesaurus, personal phone book, and corporate phone book. These are common requirements, independent of the user's particular profession and work environment.
Using Emacs as a general-purpose environment for all of these services provides several important advantages:
Emacs runs on hundreds of hardware and software platforms, including almost all versions of UNIX.
The standard distribution of Emacs must be augmented to a complete office environment.
What is needed to accomplish this is a set of cooperating software components that are available on various FTP sites on the Internet.
This is a medium-priority project.
A schedule for this project has not yet been established.
We are currently seeking sponsorship for this project.
The current project manager is Mohsen Banan.
Initial work on EOE has been started by the Free Protocols Foundation.
A starting point has been established. EOE now needs to be packaged and subjected to wider usage.