krowitz@mit-kermit.UUCP (David Krowitz) (06/11/87)
First of all, all this 'bickering' has produced the liveliest discussion I've
seen in years on this mailing list.
Let's keep it up!
Secondly, EMACS (emacs, whatever) is *not* a Unix tool. Believe it! I was there when
it was developed on a Decsystem-10 running ITS at MIT. It was originally written as
a series of TECO macros (another DEC editor originally developed at MIT eons ago).
EMACS has since been ported to TOPS-20, and TENEX (with the original TECO editor as
the base), been rewritten into various flavors of lisp and C. It is one of the
original portable programs, if only because everyone wanted a version of it running
on their machine. While it is probably *the* most powerful editor available today
I still use the DM for quick and simple editing ... a simple editor for simple stuff,
a complex editor for complex stuff. The best of all worlds (for me, at least) would
be a DM editor which was, in fact, emacs with the best features of the current DM
editor (positioning with the mouse, easy cut and paste, arrow keys, etc) retained
in a non-conflicting manner. This should be possible since emacs uses the control
characters and the DM uses a seperate key pad. The DM editor still supplies a few
features which are superior to anything else I've seen, mainly the wild use of wild
cards in searching and search/replace operations. Putting the two editors into one
would be an advance in the state of the art. In the meantime, let's stop quoting
emacs as being an advantage/disadvantage of Unix vs. AEGIS. It's like saying that
TeX is a Unix tool (it is available, but it has nothing to do with Unix). I've been
using both for 10 years running on everything from DEC PDP-6's to lisp machines.
-- David Krowitz
mit-erl!mit-kermit!krowitz@eddie.mit.edu
mit-erl!mit-kermit!krowitz@mit-eddie.arpa
krowitz@mit-mc.arpa
(in order of decreasing preference)