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From: mlandau@Diamond.BBN.COM (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: Question of curiosity: who is still buying Unipress or CCA?
Message-ID: <1196@Diamond.BBN.COM>
Date: Sat, 4-Oct-86 15:34:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: Diamond.1196
Posted: Sat Oct  4 15:34:54 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 6-Oct-86 18:46:56 EDT
References: <5205@cbrma.UUCP>
Reply-To: mlandau@Diamond.BBN.COM (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Labs, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 40

>Is anyone still shelling out real $$$ to buy either Unipress' or CCA's
>emacs programs?  If so, why?  

We're still "shelling out real $$$" for Unipress Emacs (v2.10), and quite
happy with it.  Why Unipress instead of Gnu?  Support, for one thing.
Unipress is very good about bug fixes, enhancements, etc.  I find that
Unipress Emacs is more solid and better documented than Gnu (the brand new
version 2.10 documetation is absolutely wonderful!), and if I find problems,
I call or mail to Unipress and the problems get fixed - I don't have the time
to hack around with Gnu sources, even if I wanted to.

Unipress also seems to be one or two steps ahead of Gnu when it comes to
features like process control.  Recent versions of Unipress allow you to do
things like run background processes and specify arbitrary pieces of MLisp
code to be called whenever the process changes state.  I use this facility to
compile programs and -- when the compilation is finished -- scan the error log
buffer for certain "standard" error messages, fix the code involved, and
restart the compilation.  All while I work on other things.

Finally, Unipress has some interesting ideas for future versions of Emacs and
related tools.  These include CEmacs (a complete C development environment
built on top of Emacs, with simple user interfaces for naive Emacs users),
a multi-window/multi-buffer VI that I assume will be built on top of the
Emacs diaply and buffer management kernel, and alternate extension languages
for Emacs.  (Personally, I'd like to see a C-like extension language, a la
Epsilon.)

I think the inclusion of Gnu Emacs on the 4.3 tape will be a good thing all
around.  From what I hear, Gnu is great if (1) you don't want to spend money
on an Emacs, (2) you have time to hack on the sources if necessary, and (3)
you don't need the more sophisticated features of some other Emacs'es.  The
fact that Gnu is free and widely available should provide incentive for the
commerical Emacs suppliers to go for product differentiation by making their
versions better, stronger, faster, more flexible, etc.  Everyone wins 
(assuming that Gnu doesn't drive the others out of business, which certainly
doesn't appear to be the case).
-- 
 Matt Landau      	 		BBN Laboratories, Inc.
    mlandau@diamond.bbn.com		10 Moulton Street, Cambridge MA 02238
 ...seismo!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau      (617) 497-2429