If the iPhone has helped me accomplish one thing, it has probably been to make it easier for me to stay away from Emacs. It works like this: It is not controversial to assert that Emacs is an environment all its own. You can find libraries and packages that allow Emacs to acknowledge and talk to outside environments, so it’s not a closed environment, but it’s different enough that there’s some fiddling involved to get it chatting with the outside world.