bridger%rcc@RAND-UNIX.ARPA (Bridger Mitchell) (08/17/87)
MINCE (Mince Is not Complete Emacs) was written by Mark of the Unicorn, Cambridge MA about 5 years ago, with a companion SCRIBBLE formatter (a watered down SCRIBE). It included source code (for bds-c 1.4x) for the "outer" editor routines and was extensible by recompiling/relinking. It's got the basic emacs flavor: 8 buffers, split screen, auto-insert, virtual memory, ... It lacks the high-end stuff: regular expressions, incremental search, bindable macros, etc. The MINCE+SCRIBBLE+BDS-C package was called Amethyst; and there are archived simtel20 files for the Amethyst user's group. Perfect Writer is an imperfectly-realized modification of MINCE that put the command-bindings into the swap file (making the bindings configurable without recompilation), added hooks for spell and help modes, and wrapped the editor and formatter inside an optional shell menu. It was marketed by Perfect Software, which was bought by Thorne-EMI. Perfect Writer was now and againn bundled with Kaypros, and at Plu*Perfect Systems we developed enhancements and bug fixes that patched the Kaypro version of PW into the co-called "Plu*Perfect Writer" (PPW). I use PPW and MINCE almost exclusively on CP/M machines, and use several unix and ms-dos flavors of emacs. For text and program editing the cp/m versions serve me well. How can you get MINCE or PW ? I really don't know. Unicorn won't sell to end-users and long ago stopped support of MINCE. Possibly EMI would have a PW. Plu*Perfect supports P*PW, doesn't sell PW; you have to have the original PW yourself. --bridger mitchell