Emacs OS

The more I use emacs, the more fascinating it becomes. When one starts exploring the deep end stuff of emacs, they start to realize that emacs isn’t a text editor after all; it’s more like a virtual operating system, or a regular text editor on every drug known to date. A while back I read in the O’Reilly book on how to bypass init and start a process such as bash instead. This was mainly used when one wanted root access to their system but without knowing the password.

... init=/bin/bash

and you are instantly dropped to the shell as root right after the kernel boots.

Well why not use the same thing to start something else. I experimented with writing a bash script that will start up aaxine and play a movie instead of init (aaxine is xine which uses aalib to display movies using ascii art on the console). That was fun, 3 seconds after I hit the power button in my computer starts playing a full movie in ascii.

Well I applied the same principle to emacs.

... init=/usr/bin/emacs-nox

And it does exactly what you expect it to do, right after finish booting the kernel it starts emacs. It’s so awesome its not even funny. Now you can start your own shell buffer inside emacs and remount the / as read write, and possibly do other useful things, Enjoy.