From: jthomas AT NMSU DOT Edu
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 93 16:15:44 MST
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject:  Re:  Programmers' editor

>What text editor you you prefer for software development?  I'm looking for the
>best editor that
>     1.  Costs nothing,
>     2.  Runs under MS-DOS (MS Windows 3.1 would be nice),
>     3.  Is robust and dependable.

Eric> As others have said, DEmacs is the only way to go, unless you NEED it
Eric> to run under Windows.

Second !  Or third, or fourth :-)

Eric> Bob P. writes:
> I have used demacs. It was very slow on my machine (40 Mhz 386 with
> 8meg). Slow enough to be unusable by me.

Eric> Strange.  I have a 33 MHz 386 with 4 Meg.  I find DEmacs to be quite
Eric> responsive.  I remember being shocked at just how fast it was.  The
Eric> ONLY problem I have with it is the startup time which is a little
Eric> slower than I'd like.  Do you have a decent disk cacheing program
Eric> installed?  Do you have enough free memory to avoid swapping a big
Eric> program like DEmacs?

I run it on a 16 MHz 386 with 8 Meg !  With 2 Meg of SMARTDRV (dumb as it
may be :-) DEMACS does just fine.  And on top of that, I'm actually running
the two byte Japanese nemacs version.  I agree it is not as fast as on a
real computer ;-{)} but ....

I used to use FREEMACS, but now I only use that when I want column position
for entering SNOBOL programs :-)

Jim