Emacs Webapp/Plugin

[Paul Michael Reilly]

Someone tell me again why it is a bad idea to develop a Chrome/Chromium (browser or Chrome OS) plugin that is essentially just the basic Emacs bits that we know and love?  I did sort of raise this issue a while back to no avail but it is an itch that just won't go away.

The underlying premise is that there are no "desktop" apps available on this imagined system, just web apps and browser plugins.  Using this system, I will visit a site that has a text file, think DropBox or Google Drive or some such, for example.  This text file is in fact an org-mode text file.  So I want Chrome to automagically recognize this and invoke an Emacs plugin to edit the document.  Now, as near as I can tell, this particular plugin is not available in the Chrome App store, or anywhere else.  I kind of expected/hoped Steve Yegge would have written it by now but ... he's probably too busy just being famous (or infamous).

In any case, how practical/impractical is it to talk about this group of developers producing such a tool using the current code base?

Left to my own devices, I would be inclined to write the plugin first trying not to modify Emacs internals but I have a hunch that will prove impractical.  Once there are internal Emacs changes required the question arises on how best to package the tool in the bazaar sources.

Would this notion be a variant of the ability to "embed" Emacs into another app?

-pmr