Mail Archives: djgpp/1995/04/05/14:24:05
Re: comments by <huntercr AT cs DOT purdue DOT edu>
>Is there such a thing as a good emacs? ;-)
How about GNU Emacs? As DJ pointed out, the recent versions compile
as-is. (Only hassle is that the makefiles refer to Unix file hacking tools
like rm, but that can be handled by installing fileutils from some
appropriate
place that someone pointed me to recently.)
> Hope my answers weren't too distracting. Have you checked out micro
>emcas? Don't know much about it...
Micro-Emacs isn't bad, but it suffers from a variety of limitations that
make it
not really deserve the name. Its user interface is roughly like real Emacs,
but the Meta keys don't work via Alt (you have to do ESC-foo which is
a hassle). BIG problem is that there isn't any Undo. Some other things
come out of the box wrong, like search, but at least that one can be
customized to be the automatic incremental search that Emacs has.
Which brings me to the point that customization is entirely different since
Micro-Emacs uses a vaguely C-like language for this, rather than Emacs Lisp.
Until recently I used Micro-Emacs much of the time, and GNU Emacs in a
DOS window for hard stuff. The limitations of the DOS window and the fact
that GNU Emacs has a habit of stomping on the system state and making
all sorts of things croak after you exit kept me from using it all the
time...
Then recently I finally found a copy of Windows Emacs (the Lucid Emacs
port, from CICA), which seems to be the best of both worlds in spite of the
annoyance of the register message. Certainly it works well enough that
I'm no longer seriously tempted to write a Windows-32 front end for the
GNU Emacs code...
paul
PS. Speaking of Windows Emacs: not being able to get to CICA itself, I
looked
on the shadows. For some strange reason, the shadow at decwrl does not
have it. But the one at ftp.cdrom.com does.
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