View source for Idea: next generation emacs

I'm not the first to think of this, but it's worth putting down on paper my thoughts here.

Let's start with a problem statement. You open emacs, it takes a while, then it shows this super tiny ui that has a janky button feel and confusing keyboard nav. The keyboard shortcuts are totally out of line with OS-standard keys. The customization language is emacs lisp.

[[File:Emacs default UI on windows.png|thumb|look at this shit]]Yet it's the best IDE I've used, because it's so configurable.

Let's focus on a couple specific issues.

Date representation. For example you call `(current-time)` and you get a list of 4 numbers, `(25598 19903 350786 0)`. Like what a simple object representation system. (simple is good tho right? ;) Ok but actually date representation doesn't matter much, it's an editor after all...

Since emacs lisp is such a bespoke language, it doesn't have a standalone interpreter support / library for evaluating expressions. You gotta open up emacs itself.

But you can access a standalone emacs repl like so:

`emacs -nw --eval '(ielm)'`

but then the standard keybindings to get to the last input etc don't work, you have to use m-n and m-p (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2020-12/msg00678.html) or you can rebind it. So we start looking down the rabbit hole of emacs customization just like that!