Posted by kilon.alios on Aug 23, 2014; 8:04pm URL: https://forum.world.st/Can-Pharo-meet-all-your-computing-needs-tp4774250p4774276.html
"Hi folks
I've been playing with Pharo recently, and really enjoying writing some programs in the Pharo environment."
Hello and welcome to the Pharo family
"As a result, I've been wondering if I can use Pharo the way I would use Emacs, as an environment for doing everything."
No Pharo is a different beast, but beast none the less. Each one has its pros and cons. Emacs is more for CL and text editing stuff and excels at that . Pharo is more for GUI and Graphics stuff and it excels at that. Emacs is more popular and more actively developed but Pharo comes with a very powerful programming language and much more performant than elisp. Personally I use both Emacs and Pharo , I love both and I find both awesome. I use emacs for documenting stuff for Pharo , like my contribution to updating the Pharo By Example book to Pharo 3 and 4.
"* Send emails to this mailing list?"
I think there are libraries for dealing with emails, I dont think there is an actual email client for Pharo though if my memory serves me correctly I remember a email client for Squeak. So its definitely doable with Pharo.
"* Use IRC?"
Again I think there is no client for this, definitely a cool project , again doable with Pharo because it has very good support for sockets and IRC is a rather simple socket protocol. I use sockets extensively for my project "Ephestos" to make Pharo talk to Python and use Python libraries from inside Pharo even with Pharo syntax. Using sockets is actually very simple.
"Start Bash?"
Pharo has a command shell, similar to emacs eshell. But I dont know how powerful it is and if it has full shell support but for basic stuff it works as I have tested it personally but I prefer using Xterm 2 .
If you mean call shell scripts thats doable too, also pharo can be called from the terminal and used as a bash tool , so you have many options here.
"Read the Pharo documentation (e.g. Pharo By Example)?"
No you cant read (AFAIK) Pharo By Example from inside Pharo but there is a help tool similar to emacs help tool. Unfortunately it has not been the preferred choice for documenting stuff. On the other hand Pillar which is a quite popular choice for Pharo documentation works on top of Latex and can export to html , markdown and pdf and of course text files. So documentation wise I think Pharo is more powerful than Emacs in what it can do.
Because I happen to use Pillar a lot for updating Pharo By Example I really like it so far and I think Pharo devs have done a very good job with it. I think also because pillar syntax is very simple it should not be too hard to make pillar files viewable from inside Pharo. So I think we are close with that target too.
"Is there a package manager I can use to find new tools I can use in Pharo"
yes its called "configuration browser" and comes included with Pharo. If you get a latest Pharo 3 image you should already seen a lot of packages in the configuration browser, Installing them is also a single action process.
"If these things do exist, how do I discover them?"
the old trusted process of googling . Here some links that google returned to me