Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc:8440 comp.sys.laptops:2486 gnu.misc.discuss:2820 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!decwrl!sgi!shinobu!odin!tweezers.esd.sgi.com!portuesi From: portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc,comp.sys.laptops,gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Freemacs or MG2a or Epsilon? Message-ID: <1991Apr10.164029.8489@odin.corp.sgi.com> Date: 10 Apr 91 16:40:29 GMT References: Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News) Reply-To: portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA. Lines: 62 Hakon Lie writes: >portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) writes: >>In article , Hakon Lie >>writes: >>>It's a waste of money, the GNU products are in most cases superior to >>>the commercial versions. If they aren't -- someone (maybe you) will >>>make them better.. >> >>I don't understand what you're talking about. Unless you have a >>386 or better, you are never going to get GNU Emacs to run on your >>laptop. Other than that, Epsilon has far, far more features and >>far more extensibility than every public-domain editor available. > There is no doubt that GNU-emacs requires performace. Of course not. I use it on my workstation all the time and I love it. It's a great editor. But at the very least you need at least a 386 and lots of memory to make it run on a PC, and even then it would have to run as a protected-mode program under Windows or extended DOS or something. To my knowledge, nobody has done that port. > However, that doesn't make it an inferior editor. Nobody said that GNU was an inferior editor to anything, including Epsilon. My point is that there is no publically available editor for the PC which can match Epsilon for features and flexibility, including Freemacs, MicroEmacs, mg, Jove, etc. etc. If you manage to produce a 386 extended-mode port of GNU emacs and offer to buy me a Toshiba 2000SX to run it on, perhaps I might switch to GNU. But Epsilon is a powerful editor which runs well on the hardware it was designed for, and makes good use of every system resource available (supports EMS, swaps large files to disk, supports all display devices, etc). It runs fine on my T1000XE with a 10 Mhz 8086. GNU Emacs does not. > It requires performace because it does a lot of things other editors > won't do. Including Epsilon. GNU has a lot more "out of the box" functionality than Epsilon. But I can't think of a single feature that GNU has that could not be implemented in Epsilon's EEL extension language. Epsilon is a full fledged Emacs implementation by every standard Stallman set forth a long time ago. Furthermore, the "out of the box" functionality provided by Epsilon covers about 90-95% of the things that I do with GNU Emacs. > How can you claim that an editor without an undo facility has > "far more features" ? Epsilon has offered a multi-level Undo facility comparable to that in GNU Emacs for a while now. > I am seriously interested in how you came to this conclusion. Have you actually used Epsilon? m. __ \/ Michael Portuesi Silicon Graphics, Inc. portuesi@sgi.com "Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child." -- Vice President Dan Quayle