warren (01/17/83)
Just to complete the roster, I thought I should mention the emacs variant that I wrote and that has wide distribution inside of Bell Labs. It is not as feature rich as Gosling's or Zimmerman's emacs, though it does provide a basic set of capabilities (Multi-window, Multi-file, regions, kill stack, etc.) plus an extension language. (The extension language is not nearly as nice as m-lisp, but will let you do some rather hairy hacking, and it does come with a set of macro packages for such things as RMAIL, spelling correction, abbreviations, etc. The main point of interest about it is that it was designed for a small address space (pdp-11), and thus runs well in a small amount of space and isn't particulary fussy about the operating system it runs under. The display update is reasonably quick and it can run either with termcap, or with it's own extensible terminal support database. The hitch is that it is not in the public domain, and at this point is available only inside of the Bell System. The Unix folks are exploring the possibility of licensing it for other use. They usually want money in return for such nuisance. They tell me that deals involving lots of machines in one contract, or a distributor that packages software in systems that are then sold, work best, since the overhead of writing the contract is spread over lots of copies. I can promise nothing about the potential availability or cost of my emacs in this way. If you are seriously interested in this, feel free to send a request either to me or to the Murray Hill computing information librarian. Please include your name, affiliation, what you would be willing to pay, and some description of your application. Warren Montgomery Room 6E-338 Bell Laboratories Naperville Road Naperville, ILL 60566 (ihnss!warren)