Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!van-bc!ubc-cs!morrison
From: morrison@cs.ubc.ca (Rick Morrison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Alternate as a Meta key in emacs??
Message-ID: <6924@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 90 18:58:50 GMT
References: <23460001@pnl-geo.UUCP> <1990Feb25.001112.17746@athena.mit.edu> <16228@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <9523@portia.Stanford.EDU> <1702@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Reply-To: morrison@cs.ubc.ca (Rick Morrison)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 49

In article <1702@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> lacsap@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Pascal Chesnais) writes:
> ...
>Still on the emacs thread, has anyone forked out the $150 dollars for
>the GNU sources, and if so can they make them available via anonymous ftp?
>At the very least the next specific stuff needed to build emacs.  I'd like
>to get X support running on my emacs.
>
So would I. For those who can't imagine why some of us emacs users are
willing to go to these lengths rather than use emacs in a Terminal,
here are my pet peeves with NeXTStep (which I judiciously submitted
on the user feedback form way back in Release 0.8):

1) Terminal is a (sort of) VT100. If I wanted to use emacs on
   a VT100 I would have bought one. With (left and right) ALT, COMMAND
   and what-have-you, I should be able to keybind myself into oblivion.
   
2) The mouse is dead in Terminal. Under X you can put the cursor where
   you point, scroll, cut-and-paste, etc, etc.

3) I hate click-to-type.

4) Under X, applications, including emacs, may be run on faster machines also
   running X. If there were other machines supporting NeXTStep, this wouldn't
   be an issue. And I don't mean IBMs running EI-AI-X.

So, I have a request:

NeXT release a decent Terminal app and extensions which support emacs
as does X.

and an observation:

It would be in NeXT's best interest to develop the "NeXTStep client side" for
other platforms -- Sun, HP/Apollo, SGI, Mips (coincidentally, just the
stable of machines we have here at UBC:-). Then, at least one half of the
standard objection: "Why develop software for a proprietary window system
with a small installed base?" would be removed.

Of course, NeXT could take a really bold step and release the whole thing
to the public domain, as Sun (sort of) did with NFS. Or is it already too
late? Are we really going to be stuck with X windows for the next 10 years?
-----------------------
Rick Morrison		 | {alberta,uw-beaver,uunet}!ubc-cs!morrison
Dept. of Computer Science| morrison@cs.ubc.ca
Univ. of British Columbia| morrison%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5  | morrison@ubc.csnet (ubc-csgrads=128.189.97.20)
(604) 228-5010

base?"