[comp.emacs] To Buy or Not to Buy ??

aks@HUB.UCSB.EDU (Alan Stebbens) (12/15/90)

> So here is my question:  To Buy or Not ... that is, if we want
> EDT emulation, should we buy an emacs package such as Uniworks CCA
> EMACS or UniPress Emacs?

I used to work for a company which built interfaces for both 4.3BSD and
VMS Vaxen.  I used GNU Emacs for my software development because it was:

1) Provided a uniform editing and development environments
2) Easily extensible by *me*, and not necessarily by the SysAdmin.
3) Free

Notice my priorities.

When I travelled to customer sites, I always carried a VMS BACKUP tape
with a dump of my Emacs binary and library, compiled for the various VMS
releases which I might encounter.

Prior to Perl, Emacs was the only choice for quick-n-dirty text
manipulations.  I found it to be easier to do these odd tasks, than to
write csh (sh)+awk+sed scripts.  And, when the complexity of the task
grew, the Emacs lisp code was easier to debug than the corresponding csh
scripts.

Do not make false assumptions about GNU EMacs being free: that is, do
not assume that spent money means a better product.  The support which
is available, for free, for GNU Emacs is much, much better than you'll
ever find for any commercial product.

Here's why:  Since Emacs is free, many, many people on the network have
not only the elisp files, but the Emacs C source code as well.  Because
of this, you can post a query to Usenet to "gnu.emacs.help" or
"comp.editors", or somesuch, and likely get pointers to a solution, or
even the solution itself.  The responsiveness is on the order of a few
hours, between query and one or more answers.

Oh yeah: because it's free, YOU have the source code as well; you can
very well read the code to understand your problem, and even modify it
yourself.

When you buy a commercial product, the *ONLY* place you can get a really
technical answer, and modification especially, is the vendor.  And, you
almost never have the option of modifying the code to suit your site,
without spending tons of money.

Of course, I'm generalizing a little, obviously in favor of GNU Emacs.
But, I don't think you'll ever regret deciding in favor of GNU Emacs.

By the way, I'm "expert" with "vi", "edt", and "eve" (well, I used to
be); I still prefer Emacs.

Alan Stebbens   Computer Resource Manager
		Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CCSE)
		University of California, Santa Barbara
		3111 Engineering I
		Santa Barbara, CA 93106

Internet: aks@hub.ucsb.edu
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Voice:    (805) 893-8135 (CCSE Office: 893-3221)

rms@AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Stallman) (12/17/90)

GNU Emacs is a large program; it starts out at around 1/2 Meg on CISC
machines, and probably larger on RISC machines.

However, on most kinds of systems, most of this space is pure and
shared by all the users.  Thus, it usually is not a significant cost
when you have many users.  However, on some machines, the pure Lisp
data and some other data cannot be shared.  This might add 200k per
user.  This is true for machines for which NO_REMAP is defined.

However, if GNU Emacs uses a whole meg of unshared memory, or even a
quarter of a meg, just to edit a small file, this is not usual; it
is worth investigating.  Maybe something is nonstandard at your site.