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

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almost Emacs doctor screenshot

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. (A parody - not therapy, not medical anything.) How to use it.

/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. How to use it.

almost Emacs calc screenshot

/isearch - paste or open any text file and search it incrementally with the authentic echo-area wording and match counts in the mode line. How to use it.

almost Emacs isearch screenshot

All three are pure client-side pages - nothing you type leaves your machine (Google Analytics for visit stats only) - 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, guided and reviewed. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

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