Xref: utzoo comp.emacs:10567 comp.editors:3028 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!ucla-cs!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.editors Subject: Re: Freemacs or MG2a or Epsilon? Message-ID: Date: 19 Apr 91 04:08:30 GMT References: <1991Apr15.153319.16252@odin.corp.sgi.com> <1991Apr15.202734.5556@midway.uchicago.edu> <1991Apr17.105626.19265@netcom.COM> Followup-To: comp.emacs Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 46 By the editor that compiles from C, you may mean Epsilon. It has an extension language that is to C what Gnu Emacs Lisp is to Lisp. It's an almost complete C (the only major omission is floating point), but modified for interpretive execution and with additional data types for buffers, etc. My impression is that "compilation" is like compilation of Gnu Emacs Lisp, i.e. that it's sort of a compression operation, but doesn't produce machine code. Epsilon includes source for the portions of the editor that are written in the extension language. They encourage people to share new stuff written in the extension language, and seem to have a bbs for doing so (though I haven't used it). Like Gnu Emacs, essentially everything that a normal user would want to hack is written in the extension language, so that makes it a fairly "open" product. Not that I wouldn't prefer one with all of the source free, of course, but it's certainly a much friendlier way of dealing with things than many other products. I wouldn't say it's faster than Freemacs. I have yet to see any other PC editor that is even as fast as Freemacs. Its primary advantages are that it will handle big files, and that it is a rather complete Emacs. It seems to have about as good support for MS-DOS as Gnu Emacs does for Unix. It swaps files to disk, so it isn't even limited by your memory. (The swapping is quite fast.) It also has rather nice documentation. What prompted me to use Epsilon was primarily the ability to handle files >64K. (Sorry, I know you don't want to hear that, but you asked the question, and that's the answer.) I haven't looked carefully enough at the un-Trac code available for Freemacs to evaluate whether it is as "complete" as Epsilon. My basic criteria for an Emacs clone are: - must be able to edit its own executable. This requires it to handle files >64K, unlimited length "lines", and nulls. There are micro Emacs clones that fail on each of these counts. - must have builtin documentation including at least apropos - must do completion on file names and meta-x command names - must be roughly as complete as Gnu Emacs for editing text and C programs. Doesn't have to be able to read netnews or play tic-tac-toe. The public-domain clones I have seen all stop at the first test. Believe it or not, I really do use Emacs for editing binaries, fairly often (on both PC's and Unix). It's pretty common to get commercial or other binary software with hardcoded file names or things that can be customized in an editor. It's also often useful to be able to edit things like TAR files and other more or less binary-format stuff.