jv@mh.nl (Johan Vromans) (09/04/87)
One of the advantages of Emacs editors is that they behave the same. ^F advances a character, ^N moves to the next line, and so on. This makes it easy to use different Emacs editors on different systems. Of course there is also a disadvantage: they all behave different. When you compare GNU Emacs, Unipress (Gosling) Emacs, Jove, MicroEmacs, Scame and others, you'll find nasty differences in the names of functions and variables, and in the default binding of keystrokes. Some of them allow you to redefine functions, and most of them allow you to change key bindings. Because I consider GNU Emacs to be the most original Emacs (all Emacs documentation mention Richard Stallman to be the "inventor") all the others spend a considerable amount of time to process custom start-up files which make them look (more or less) like GNU Emacs. How about making them all "standard" ? ANSI-Emacs ?
barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin) (09/05/87)
In article <1269@mhres.mh.nl> jv@mh.nl (Johan Vromans) writes: >Because I consider GNU Emacs to be the most original Emacs (all Emacs >documentation mention Richard Stallman to be the "inventor") While Stallman is the inventor of EMACS, GNU EMACS is one of the youngest EMACS implementations around. He invented EMACS about ten years ago for the PDP-10's at MIT (running an MIT homebrew operating system called ITS). There are many differences, including changed key bindings, between PDP-10 EMACS and GNU EMACS. For example, PDP-10 EMACS doesn't have any of the C-C-prefixed key-bindings. I think Stallman got many of GNU EMACS's key bindings from Gosling (Unipress) EMACS, presumably because it was so common in the Unix community. (On the other hand, Zimmerman, who wrote CCA EMACS, strove to maintain compatibility with PDP-10 EMACS.) --- Barry Margolin Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com seismo!think!barmar
ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (09/06/87)
Guess again. RMS was the inventor, but GNU EMACS was the second pass at it. Do not deny Warren Montgomery, James Gosling, Jonathon Payne, etc... credit for giving us the early decent C/UNIX versions of EMACS.