delton@pro-carolina.cts.COM (Don Elton) (12/12/87)
Someone had posted a note on the net asking about the differences between
Micro Emacs and AMACS, a commercial "Emacs clone" for ProDOS 8 written by
Brian Fox. Here are Brian's comments:
>From pro-sol!amacs Fri Dec 11 07:42:04 1987
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 87 07:24:16 PST
Ppath: pro-carolina!delton
From: amacs@pro-sol.cts.com (Brian Fox)
Subject: AMACS and uEmacs
I have used uEmacs on a macintosh. To put it blunty, it was not an editor
that I would use. Much of the functionality was gone, with no way to get it
back. There was no completion parsing (i.e. no M-X) which means that there is
no way to rebind keys, or run init files. This means no Customization!
Since one of the main goals for Emacs is provide customization at the user
level, I feel that this editor loses. In addition, only a small subset of the
commands generally available in real Emacs' are available in uEmacs.
People have said "Yeah, but it's free...". My response to that is simple:
If uEmacs was a full Emacs, like GNU Emacs, and had an extremely large number
of centralized users (also like GNU Emacs) then the distribution of it as free
software, available from one location would make sense. Since each person who
gets uEmacs must either live with what is wrong with it, or fix it, we have an
extremely large number of incompatible copies running around, and no
reasonable standard.
The price that I charge for AMACS is almost nominal; it pays for the
materials used in packaging (I assume satisfied customers can vouch for that,
and for the support of the software (if there is a bug, I fix it), and for the
continued development of the software (I will add reasonable library requests,
and that at a high rate of implementation). It also helps to offset the costs
incurred for writing the next version of AMACS, which has a built in Lisp.
Allright, I'm done flaming now.
Brian Fox
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Pro-Carolina: 803-776-3936 (300-2400 baud, login as 'register')friedman@athos.rutgers.edu (Gadi ) (12/12/87)
In article <8712112336.AA18794@crash.cts.com> delton@pro-carolina.cts.COM (Don Elton) writes: > Someone had posted a note on the net asking about the differences between > Micro Emacs and AMACS, a commercial "Emacs clone" for ProDOS 8 written by > Brian Fox. Here are Brian's comments: Besides, Microemacs does not run on an Apple IIe/c !!! (Unless there is a version I don't know about.) Gadi -- uucp: {ames, cbosgd, harvard, moss}!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!friedman arpa: FRIEDMAN@ARAMIS.RUTGERS.EDU
lwv@n8emr.UUCP (Larry W. Virden) (12/13/87)
Obviously MicroEmacs doesnt need MY words to defend it, but for the uninitiated, MicroEmacs is a free editor, written in C, which currently is distributed to run on all manner of Unix machines, Amigas, Atari's and MS-Dos machines. Someone put together a half hearted port to the Mac, with only a small portion of the full functionality of the editor, and made it available about a year ago. It was one of the cheapest means for a programmer to get at a 'real' editor (excuse the expression). This was based on a 3.8 or earlier version. MicroEmacs is now at version 3.9e. The current MicroEmacs as distributed does NOT support the Mac. This may show up in 3.9f or later - then again, it may not. It Supports more programmable features than ANY editor currently available on the IIgs. I dont know much about Mac editors but would guess that the same situation exists there. This program allows you to write macros for any function keys that your terminal / computer has - and you have all the source so that function key can mean anything that you want it to - for instance Open-Apple and lower case, OA-Upper case, Option-lower case, Option Upper case aOpen and Option and control characters, etc. could ALL be function keys on the IIgs if it were ported to this machine. In environments where it is supported, one can escape to the shell, run other commands and place the output in a window (oh, I forgot to mention, quite a large number of windows and buffers can be open at once), or you can feed the contents of a window TO a command and put the results in that place. You can define all sorts of sophisticated macros using a multi-line macro language. There are all sorts of modes built in, such as C mode (making the entry and editing of C code easier), etc. All in all, quite an impressive editor. Since there are over 10,000 users of this editor (my guesstimate looking at the high level of activity on usenet about it) there are lots of folks finding fixes and adding new code. The author himself posts updates quite often and incorporates new features as they become popular. The biggest advantage to having the source code is that, especially in this case, it is portable enough code that with some work one should be able to get the program up on most any computer of a decent size. The executable is less than 73,000 bytes on a Vax 11/785 running Ultrix 1.2. It is VEYR fast coming up. You can reconfigure all the keys to you liking - make it look and act like freewriter if you want! All in all, the only BAD aspect of this program for IIgs owners is that it has not been ported to the IIgs yet. Once someone takes that task in hand - and a fellow I know on CIS says that he is looking into this - then even WE will be able to get on the band wagon. Yours for equal time. -- Larry W. Virden 75046,606 (CIS) 674 Falls Place, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068 (614) 864-8817 cbosgd!n8emr!lwv (UUCP) cbosgd!n8emr!lwv@PSUVAX1 (BITNET) We haven't inherited the world from our parents, but borrowed it from our children.