‘Almost’ Emacs in your browser: M-x doctor, M-x calc and isearch

🩺🧮🔍

For fun, over lunch: three little tools I love from Emacs, rebuilt as web pages - close enough to the originals that I hope you get the “aha, just like the good old Emacs” feeling. Guru key bindings work; buttons exist for normal human beings.

/doctor - the ELIZA psychotherapist from M-x doctor, complete with the original greeting and the RET-twice-to-submit ritual. Say goodbye and the doctor will, of course, send you a bill. (A parody - not therapy, not medical anything.)

/calc - the RPN stack calculator in the spirit of M-x calc: the --- Emacs Calculator Mode --- buffer, a live Calc Trail pane beside it, and the bindings your fingers remember - RET push/dup, TAB swap, n negate, & 1/x, Q sqrt, U undo, DEL drop.

/isearch - paste or open any text file and search it incrementally: C-s forward, C-r backward, smart case folding, and the authentic echo-area wording - I-search:, Failing I-search:, Wrapped I-search: - with match counts in the mode line. C-g quits, RET saves the mark where the search started, and there’s a one-click copy-out.

All three are pure client-side pages - nothing you type leaves your machine - and each engine has unit tests behind it. They are affectionate imitations, not ports of the actual elisp; where behavior differs, blame me, not RMS.

Please play with them and comment below - especially if your Emacs muscle memory catches a binding behaving wrong.

Full disclosure: this post - and any code or tool it describes - was co-authored with Claude (Anthropic’s AI, via Claude Code). I directed, reviewed and tested; Claude wrote most of the code and most of the text. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.