BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB.ARPA (08/10/84)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB.ARPA> We recently received yet another EMACS clone for the IBM-PC. This one is called Epsilon and is from Lugaru Software in Pittsburgh. This product is clearly superior to Mince from Mark of the Unicorn, and while I can't claim it is superior to Gosling EMACS from Unipress Epsilon fits my needs and is better matched to a floppy disk based system and is closer to Tops-20 EMACS than the larger Gosling Emacs. The first thing that strikes the user is that Epsilon is very fast. While it is written in Lattice C (as are the other two Emacs clones) it uses direct screen writes and seems to have an intelligent screen update algorithm such that only the minimum need be updated. It appears that Lugaru software has completely rewritten the keyboard driver as the ALT key works as a true Meta key and can be used in conjunction with control and shift to provide just about any key combination one would ever want. One side effect of this practice is that things like Borland Sidekick or Scroll-Mate or Codesmith86 won't work with this program. All these programs install themselves and scan keyboard input for specific key combinations. Since Lugaru has taken over the interrupt vectors you can't do things like dial your smart modem or look at your calendar from inside Epsilon. Epsilon includes command and file name completion similar to Tops-20 or the new Kermit. It is a bit unnerving that when escaping on a buffer name the buffer switch happens so fast that it leaves the user a bit confused. Also the Lugaru programmers seem not to like the bell. If you mis-type a file, command, or buffer name and Epsilon can't find a match it just sits there. While escape echoes as a space when no match is found, I would prefer the option of having it echo as a bell. The Help system is quite extensive and context sensitive just like real EMACS. The disk also comes with a TEACH file which should get the novice running quickly. Epsilon has an incremental search which includes the recursive edit feature. Epsilon will use all of available memory and will create a swap file as necessary for very large files. I tried editing a couple of dozen large files at once and got bored before I could make Epsilon slow down significantly. While Epsilon isn't extensible in the manner of the Teco or Mlisp based systems, it has keyboard macros, and functions can easily be bound to any key. It is possible to name macros and save them to disk or read them in on initialization. As Epsilon uses environment variables for path names in an intelligent fashion finding libraries or help files on a hard disk system is trivial. Epsilon requires at least a 192K system, but the program only takes up 72K of disk space plus another 50K for the documentation files. The price is $150 retail. Comparing Epsilon and Gosling EMACS is a bit like the old apples and oranges problem. Epsilon tries to be like Tops-20 EMACS while Gosling EMACS includes many of the Unix operating system functions as part of its run time environment. There are many things Unipress' Gosling EMACS can do Epsilon can't do. The sophisticated EMACS user would probably prefer Unipress' EMACS, however I find Epsilon meets my needs. Lugaru Software Ltd. Box 11037 Pittsburgh, PA (412)621-5911 -------