e is a customizable self-aware Emacs-like editor written in Chez Scheme

Every few months, some developer wakes up in a cold sweat and decides the world needs another Emacs. It's practically a rite of passage at this point — like building a Lisp or writing a text editor in Rust. But "e" has a hook that's worth paying attention to: Chez Scheme. That's not a toy choice. Chez is the production-grade Scheme that Cisco backed for years, and it's the kind of runtime that can actually handle the demands of a real editor. When someone picks Chez over, say, Chicken or Gauche, they're signaling they care about performance and reliability, not just cleverness. The "self-aware" angle is the part that's either genius or marketing fluff, and I'm leaning toward curious. In the Emacs tradition, extensibility means you can hack your editor into doing anything — but "self-aware" suggests something deeper, maybe an editor that can introspect its own state and modify its behavior at runtime in ways that go beyond simple hooks and advice. If that's real, it could be genuinely interesting. If it's just a buzzword for "I can eval code in my editor," then it's Tuesday. What's striking is the HN reception — 18 points and 11 comments is a lukewarm response for something this ambitious. The open source community has seen enough editor projects to develop a healthy skepticism. We've watched GNU Emacs evolve, watched Neovim split off, watched Helix and Zed grab attention. The bar for "new editor" is high, and the burden of proof is on the author to show why Chez Scheme and self-awareness beat forty years of Emacs Lisp and a battle-tested ecosystem. Still, I'd argue this is exactly the kind of experiment open source needs. Emacs's dominance has always been about its Lisp core, and Chez Scheme is arguably a better Lisp for the job than Emacs Lisp — faster, cleaner, more powerful. If "e" delivers on its promise, it could be a serious contender for the crown, or at least a fascinating case study in what a modern Emacs might look like. The source is at https://github.com/paveluv/e, and I'd encourage anyone who's ever cursed at `setq` to take a look.