Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc:8560 comp.sys.laptops:2524 gnu.misc.discuss:2832 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!agate!agate!phr From: phr@lightning.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Rubin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc,comp.sys.laptops,gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Freemacs or MG2a or Epsilon? Message-ID: Date: 13 Apr 91 11:30:47 GMT References: <1991Apr10.164029.8489@odin.corp.sgi.com> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: ucb Lines: 34 In-Reply-To: portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com's message of 10 Apr 91 16: 40:29 GMT In article <1991Apr10.164029.8489@odin.corp.sgi.com> portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) writes: 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. I've used Epsilon quite a lot and admire it, but comparing it to GNU Emacs is like comparing a bicycle to the space shuttle. Epsilon does *not* contain the EEL extension language, i.e. you cannot type EEL expressions at Epsilon and have it interpret them, like you can in Emacs Lisp. EEL is implemented in a separate program that compiles EEL scripts to byte code which you then load into Epsilon. This makes debugging lots of fun. Also, EEL is very similar to C, which for writing editor commands, is *not* an advantage. For example, there is no string type--you must use char *'s like in C, and you must malloc and free the strings as there is no garbage collector. (Am I still correct?). I don't mean to knock Epsilon, just to correct some overstatement. Epsilon actually runs reasonably fast on a *4.77 MHz* Toshiba T1000, and it is small enough to leave in the ramdisk all the time. Brief is way too slow for such machines, besides being a lot bigger. To the person who asks whether Epsilon's default keybindings are messed up (i.e. "improved" from Emacs's): yes, they, are, but not too badly. JOVE messes them up considerably more. MG tries to remain faithful, though they messed up in a few places too, sometimes by accident. By the way, has anyone ported ELLE to MS-DOS?