Re: Emacs as a desktop environment

[Tom Tromey]

Ken> * viewing .doc files, editing/viewing spreadsheets from others,
Ken> making presentation slides (OpenOffice); not very common, so not a
Ken> big deal

I do presentations in Emacs using epresent.el.
It is primitive but more than sufficient for my purposes; YMMV.

Ken> * general web browsing (firefox/iceweasel); yes, there's w3 mode,
Ken> and I haven't looked at it in a long time, but the last update to
Ken> the git repo on gnu.org was three years ago, and it seems like it'd
Ken> be insufficient these days unless it's got Java and Javascript and
Ken> Flash and TLS and certificate management and video and (etc); well,
Ken> maybe not video or Flash much for work specifically

I think Emacs will never be an excellent web browser, but for some
specific things (e.g., Gtk documentation or Bugzilla), I use w3m and a
local setting for browse-url-browser-function that picks what viewer to
use depending on the URL.

Ken> Multithreading in Emacs is sorely lacking; really, having my log
Ken> viewer and ssh windows freeze, because my spreadsheet is being
Ken> recomputed or I'm loading a really big file from a slow file
Ken> server, just isn't acceptable behavior for a desktop environment.

My progress on this is much slower than I'd like :-(

Tom