ARPAVAX:CAD:clemc (05/14/82)
Pavel Curtis is incorrect about CMU. CMU and I belive Case Western also has a Industrial (e.g. 40000 smackers) license for some of the Unix sites. This protects them if they wish to do Contract Research. (Which by the way most University's do WITHOUT an Industrial License, which is Illegal). As for CMU, a few years agao, myself and a few others threatenned to quit until CMU purchased the license. Later I would become of member of the License Subcommitte for /usr/group, so believe me, I've read that #$%^& license. If you are a Unix site that does research for an outside contractor (techinical the government is such a contractor), you must obtain a license. The educational license is for that only!!! Notice that ATT (then WE) spent a lot of time making different types of licenses for different type of University situtations. So before you scream at Gosling, better check to see if all of Cornell is legal to the letter!! Clem Cole (former CMU, type, now at UCB)
pavel (05/14/82)
It should be pointed out, especially to Mr. Gosling, that since his EMACS program was developed on UNIX under an educational license, the only 'charging' he can do is a nominal fee for his time in making the tape. Pavel Curtis Cornell University
cak (05/14/82)
Steve (and the rest of the net), The only real drawback of your EMACS is that it isn't extensible; people can't write their own functions. True, Gosling doesn't provide complete Lisp or C modes; but we have excellent ones here, tuned to the way people use things here. Gosling's Emacs provides us the ability to extend and adjust the functionality at our leisure and/or whim. Chris Kent, Purdue CS
z (05/14/82)
It is often claimed, I think accurately, that editors are a religious issue. Maybe this should go in net.theology? Oh, well. In my opinion, one major problem of Gosling's EMACS is that not only does it provide the ability to tailor your environment, which is good, but it makes such tailoring a necessity. The lack of a large portion of the standard EMACS command set means that each site will either have to invest a fair amount of effort into writing their own macros, find out which of the many sites using the editor have already done this, or do without. I understand that a macro library comes with Gosling's EMACS, but it still leaves uncovered vast areas of the standard EMACS command set. Furthermore, there are important features of an editor which simply can't be done by macros, such as crash recovery and an undo command. Such features have to be built into the structure of the editor itself. The absence of such features in Gosling's EMACS seems to me to be a major drawback. If extensibility is to be the most important criterion in the choice of an editor, then at this point Gosling's is the clear choice over mine. But for how many people is this true? As I said in my first message, my EMACS is aimed at a different audience than Gosling's. It is my experience that only a small minority of users insist on extensibility in an editor, and my EMACS in its current state will not satisfy them. However, as the high acceptance rate here at CCA has shown, a lot of people think that it is a great improvement over the other nonextensible editors used by everyone else. Steve Zimmerman
pavel (05/15/82)
Last I heard, Steve's EMACS also didn't have real multiple windows or subprocesses. The only kind of windows in Steve's EMACS is the Twenex 'two window mode' which consists of a dashed line across the screen and only one line of information about the current file which changes depending upon which window you're in. Gosling's, on the other hand, has the ability to split any window in half, arbitrarily. You can also grow or shrink any window, thus giving you as many windows as you want of whatever size you want. (Unfortunately these are still full screen width, but so are Steve's.) Gosling's also has the ability to run an almost arbitrary process in any window. Thus many people log in to Emacs in the morning, start up a shell in a window and never leave the editor until they leave at the end of the day. While you can't use the c-shell in a window (because of the job control stuff, I think), the facilities of the editor more than make up for the lack of the csh history mechanism. One other point is that since you can't extend Steve's EMACS, you're stuck with the key-bindings and command-set that are the defaults. As far as I can see, the Emacs defaults (and this is true of both programs) are the worst defaults that I've ever seen. At least in Gosling's, you can make it useable. Enough flaming. (BTW, mea culpa on the charge that Gosling would be illegal in charging for his program. I made a silly assumption. For the fellow who pointed out my error, yes, Cornell has adhered to the letter (and spirit) of the license.) Pavel Curtis Cornell University for
fjl (05/15/82)
You can run "oldcsh" in a Gosling's emacs window, as it doesn't have job control, and get essentially all of csh's features except job control. You must put any "limit" command last in your .cshrc is all, as oldcsh doesn't know of them and will quit reading it at that point. jay lepreau
z (05/17/82)
To set the record straight: My EMACS has always had settable key bindings, both in a master file and on a per-user basis. Both are set up in an easy to use ASCII format; the user can change his key bindings as easily as he can change his newsgroups in his .newsrc file. People who don't like the default bindings can easily change them to whatever they want. More often, this feature is used in master files to set up keypad keys for various different terminals to reasonable commands.