Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!mordor!sri-spam!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: emacs for pc Message-ID: <706@athos.rutgers.edu> Date: 1 Feb 88 03:46:06 GMT References: <6629@drutx.ATT.COM> <296@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 45 I have recently gotten a PC compatible machine myself, and so have had some chance to look into Emacs for it. Unfortunately, there is no one program that is perfect. My favorite, where it works, is Freemacs. I won't repeat the information on how to get it, which was just posted. It is quite close to Gnu in its commands. It is quite fast. MINT is at least as good an extension language as Gnu Emacs Lisp. (I note that the MINT documentation doesn't reference Trac. Was it invented independently, or did there seem to be so many changes that a reference wasn't necessary?) However there are some limitations that mean it may not be your only editor: - on a monochrome screen, the default colors are wrong. You get something like bold-face text on a white background. This means you learn real quickly how to change Emacs. You also find that the mode line colors are tied to the foreground ones. I ended up with a completely black screen. Since Emacs doesn't put back the settings it found, this persisted even after I exited! This all is of course easily fixed. - control characters display white on white on a monochrome screen. COntrol char display is harcoded in the .ASM files, so you have to change it there. (I ended up turning on bit 08h instead of 10h. The comments suggest that this may have been what the author intended anyway.) - the mint files are written out in a binary compressed format, so it isn't obvious how to diff an old version with a new one to post my changes. - files are limited to 64K. The last is the only limitation that is serious. I'll post patches for the rest in a few minutes, if I can figure out how to get them out of emacs.ed. For big files, I recommend bigemacs, which is on simtel in as bigemacs.arc. It is microemacs compiled with large (or huge?) model, and with display modified to go directly to the screen, so it is faster. Microemacs has a number of drawbacks, including: - bindings aren't Gnu - it truncates lines that are too long (Freemacs can even be used to edit executable files) - there is some evidence that it truncates files at the first ^Z (probably dpeneds upon the version of C used to build it) But because it is written in C, it was easy to make a version that will handle as a big a file as your memory will handle. A Freemacs that would handle big files would be my ideal editor.