Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc:8313 comp.sys.laptops:2453 Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc,comp.sys.laptops Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!carbon!wilhelm From: wilhelm@elements.rpal.com (Robert Wilhelm) Subject: Re: Freemacs or MG2a or Epsilon? In-Reply-To: steiner@informatik.uni-kl.de's message of 5 Apr 91 16:00:17 GMT Message-ID: Sender: usenet@elements.rpal.com (Hack for news) Reply-To: wilhelm@rpal.rockwell.com Organization: Rockwell International Palo Alto Lab References: <7704@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de> Date: 5 Apr 91 16:37:38 In article <7704@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de> steiner@informatik.uni-kl.de (Donald Steiner) writes: ............. perusing the various newsgroups it seems like there are three dominant ones: Freemacs & MG, both PD, and Epsilon's commercial product. Not having any further info, I wonder if anybody would be able to spare some time to answer the following questions: 1. Which do you prefer and why? 2. Which is most customizable? 3. Which would run best on a low powered laptop? I have used Freemacs & MG on a poqet PC - this has to be one of the more "low powered pc's. The one I have has 512K of RAM and a MD/CGA compatible display. Freemacs is much more customizable and has many more features. If you have hard disk storage or ram disk of a megabyte, say, all the extension files, and documentation can be loaded as you require. Freemacs has file name completion, a crude dired, and many extensions that are similar to GNU emacs. With the mint extension language, I found that I could cobble most of the simpler extensions I have added to my emacs setup on other machines. However, on a 8088 running at about 7mHz, I found Freemacs a bit too sluggish for my habits. The character buffering and keyboard response consistly confused me. Mind you this is more a characteristic of my hardware - the freemacs software is very nice indeed. MG allows almost no customization beyond keybinding - this is by design. MG is implemented to be small in size on many platforms. I find keyboard and display response to be a bit better on my slow machine. I greatly miss filename completion but most other simple emacs operations are provided. I use this program most days. You might also be concerned about program size. MG consumes about 100K on my disk. For some reason my poqet won't put up with PKlite compression for MG but MG will compress to about 60K with PKlite. The minimum space required for Freemacs is closer to 200K and you can easily consume 400K with extensions and help. Most of the Freemacs distribution can be compressed only if you use something like a squish device-driver for on the fly compression. Both Freemacs & MG are very nice programs. My opinion is that MG runs better on low powered laptop. The is also another emacs that I am going to try soon : MicroEMACS version 3.11 is ready for BETA testing. It is available via anonymous FTP from midas.mgmt.purdue.edu (which is also called zeus.mgmt.purdue.edu) in the dist/uemacs311BETA directory outside the hours of 8am to 5pm on EST on weekdays. Bob Wilhelm Knowledge-based Engineering and currently visiting at Systems Research Laboratory Dept. of Mechanical Rockwell International Science Center & Industrial Engineering Palo Alto Laboratory University of Illinois 444 High Street at Urbana-Champaign Palo Alto, CA 94301 wilhelm@rpal.rockwell.com (415)325-0253