mg@unirot.UUCP (Mike Gallaher) (11/14/86)
That message was a (heavily-encoded, sorry, but not sarcastic) response to statements such as "Gnuemacs is the best Unix Emacs around". I certainly do pay attention to constructive well-researched comparisons, but these were not couched as such, so I interpreted them as being religiously motivated. I don't take them seriously, any more than I am serious myself when I say things like "Unipress Emacs is the greatest text editor in the solar system" (which it is). (After working on it for more than two years, naturally I think so!) But for those who don't know better, such comments could give Gosling Emacs a poor reputation that I don't think it deserves. I want to encourage people to try the choices themselves, and then decide. For the record, I am not anti-Gnuemacs; it's got some spiffy things in it, although RMS and I will probably never agree on various design issues. Btw, the GOSDIFFS file in the GnuEmacs distribution (whatever the last 17.xx was) is out of date, but I think someone besides me should fix it :-). Mike Gallaher Emacs Hacker Boss Unipress Software
king@kestrel.ARPA (Dick King) (11/17/86)
From: mg@unirot.UUCP (Mike Gallaher) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Date: 14 Nov 86 20:16:43 GMT Summary: don't knock it 'til you've tried it That message was a (heavily-encoded, sorry, but not sarcastic) response to statements such as "Gnuemacs is the best Unix Emacs around". I certainly do pay attention to constructive well-researched comparisons, but these were not couched as such, so I interpreted them as being religiously motivated. I don't take them seriously, any more than I am serious myself when I say things like "Unipress Emacs is the greatest text editor in the solar system" (which it is). (After working on it for more than two years, naturally I think so!) But for those who don't know better, such comments could give Gosling Emacs a poor reputation that I don't think it deserves. I want to encourage people to try the choices themselves, and then decide. We did just that. At our site (30 people, using editors mostly for TeX files (and editor customization files :-) )) we made both available for six months. At the end of the six months, the last-reference date on Unipress emacs was three months in the past, and when it was removed from the system nobody noticed. This experiment took place in 1985. For the record, I am not anti-Gnuemacs; it's got some spiffy things in it, although RMS and I will probably never agree on various design issues. I, for one, would show Unipress EMACS a lot more respect if it had conses. As an example, I got annoyed that UNIX doesn't have file version numbers, so I hacked up version numbering in GNUmacs in 2 hours. I then tried to do the same thing in Unipress EMACS, after having had "practice", and gave up after about 8 hours. I submit this, neither to be argumentative, nor to "run down" unipress; I submit this to try to send you a message, stronger than the one I used to send every couple of months by calling Unipress, that this one feature is important. No, we're not going to spend our days hacking .ml or .el files, but the rare occasions when we notice a nagging splinter in our sides and want to fix it, certain things are vital! Note that I did NOT harangue you for things like the rather baroque argument passing method. It is annoying but not fundamental, and to change it now would obselete code. Mr. Gallaher, PLEASE GIVE US AN EXTENDED DATA STRUCTURE OF SOME SORT. Conses would be easier and what we're used to. (I still use Unipress EMACS for my PC. Before you respond something like "see, conses make GNUmacs too bulky" I will point out that the LISP system I wrote for the PDP-11 devoted only about 2K bytes to garbage collection, and you could make that swappable.) Btw, the GOSDIFFS file in the GnuEmacs distribution (whatever the last 17.xx was) is out of date, but I think someone besides me should fix it :-). Mike Gallaher Emacs Hacker Boss Unipress Software Please counterflame to me as well as to the group. -dick
bandy@lll-crg.aRpA (Andrew Scott Beals) (11/21/86)
In article <14582@kestrel.ARPA> king@kestrel.ARPA (Dick King) writes: >[some things in response to Mike Gallaher's notette, among them:] >(I still use Unipress EMACS for my PC. Before you respond something >like "see, conses make GNUmacs too bulky" [...] No, RMS makes Gnumacs too bulky. That thing is a *pig*. Not to mention that the source code is gigantic. And that they don't provide a compress'ed version of the distribution on prep for people to ftp off, thus doubling the amount of network traffic out of mit-prep ["But you could login to prep and fix it yourself!" However, most people don't know that and clog the gateways.].. Perhaps this is why there is such a problem with the arpanet <-> milnet gateways as of late? Also, in His great wisdom, RMS decided to bind ^H to be the "Help" key. Way back when, during the true emacs days, the help key was ^_. I don't know if they're listening out there, but there are a *lot* of people who use ^H to delete the last character typed. "But you can rebind that." People say, however it is a number (five?) of non-obvious changes to totally rebind things -- my users, Gosmacs users, couldn't figure it out from the provided documentation. And let's not mention the maintainability of c-code written with the help of a bunch funny pre-processor defines that makes it look something like lisp. I think of the "baby" in Eraserhead whenever I look at that code. The code in Unipress Emacs and in Jove, on the other hand is just plain beautiful. andy -- Andrew Scott Beals (member of HASA - A and S divisions) bandy@lll-crg.arpa {ihnp4,seismo,ll-xn,ptsfa,pyramid}!lll-crg!bandy LLNL, P.O. Box 808, Mailstop L-419, Livermore CA 94550 (415) 423-1948 Primates who don't have tails should keep cats who don't have tails.
gjditchfield@watrose.UUCP (Glen Ditchfield) (11/21/86)
>a *lot* of people who use ^H to delete the last character typed. "But >you can rebind that." People say, however it is a number (five?) of >non-obvious changes to totally rebind things >Andrew Scott Beals (member of HASA - A and S divisions) >bandy@lll-crg.arpa {ihnp4,seismo,ll-xn,ptsfa,pyramid}!lll-crg!bandy >LLNL, P.O. Box 808, Mailstop L-419, Livermore CA 94550 (415) 423-1948 I would like to see a list of things to do to rebind ^h. (I'm a Macintosh owner, so I'd like to rebind ^z, ^x, ^c and ^v, too. You just can't please some people...) -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Glen Ditchfield {watmath,utzoo,ihnp4}!watrose!gjditchfield Dept of Computer Science, U of Waterloo (519) 885-1211 x6658 Waterloo, Ontario, Canada "Flame not, lest thou be singed" - Mr. Protocol
karl@osu-eddie.UUCP (11/22/86)
bandy@lll-crg.UUCP writes: >And that they don't >provide a compress'ed version of the distribution on prep for people >to ftp off, thus doubling the amount of network traffic out of >mit-prep ["But you could login to prep and fix it yourself!" >However, most people don't know that and clog the gateways.].. False. The normal file people pick up for distribution is edist.tar-mm.nn.Z, i.e., it's a compressed version. The uncompressed version is there, too, but I doubt anybody bothers when the .Z version is there. Lately, it's been available as a file split into 100,000 byte chunks, so you don't have to keep retrying from ground zero every time the arpanet chokes with timeouts, "network is unreachable," or "connection reset by peer." Rather nice. -- Karl Kleinpaste