Emacs genealogy

Paul Koning pkoning at equallogic.com
Fri Feb 4 13:07:43 CST 2005


>>>>> "Steven" == Steven M Jones <Steven> writes:

 Steven> I'd say the two big splits were the implementation of Emacs
 Steven> as a standalone editor from TECO, and then the Gosling/GNU
 Steven> split. To a lesser extent one might point to the GNU versus
 Steven> Lucid Emacs / XEmacs fork, but I don't know how divergent
 Steven> they really were, or have remained. Important to note that I
 Steven> think the Lucid Emacs fork is what pushed the FSF to get real
 Steven> window system support into Emacs 19. (It was in by 19, yes? 
 Steven> Maybe not until 20, I didn't care that much.)

GNU Emacs 19 certainly had X support, and there was a Win port of it
as well.  XEmacs works well in both of those environments, too.
(Unfortunately, it doesn't in Max OS X, yet.)

There don't seem to be all that many differences unless you're doing
hairy UI stuff, where things become utterly different.  I have a major
mode (for APL) that is absolutely XEmacs-only; I don't think it's even
possible to do what it does in GNU Emacs, and certainly it if's
possible it would be very different.

	 paul




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