From: utzoo!decvax!cca!z
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: emacs info!
Article-I.D.: cca.809
Posted: Fri May 14 12:58:49 1982
Received: Sat May 15 01:01:33 1982
References: purdue.273

It is often claimed, I think accurately, that editors are a religious
issue.  Maybe this should go in net.theology?  Oh, well.

In my opinion, one major problem of Gosling's EMACS is that not only
does it provide the ability to tailor your environment, which is good,
but it makes such tailoring a necessity.  The lack of a large portion of
the standard EMACS command set means that each site will either have to
invest a fair amount of effort into writing their own macros, find out
which of the many sites using the editor have already done this, or do
without.  I understand that a macro library comes with Gosling's EMACS,
but it still leaves uncovered vast areas of the standard EMACS command
set.  Furthermore, there are important features of an editor which
simply can't be done by macros, such as crash recovery and an undo
command.  Such features have to be built into the structure of the
editor itself.  The absence of such features in Gosling's EMACS seems to
me to be a major drawback.

If extensibility is to be the most important criterion in the choice of
an editor, then at this point Gosling's is the clear choice over mine.
But for how many people is this true?  As I said in my first message, my
EMACS is aimed at a different audience than Gosling's.  It is my
experience that only a small minority of users insist on extensibility
in an editor, and my EMACS in its current state will not satisfy them.
However, as the high acceptance rate here at CCA has shown, a lot of
people think that it is a great improvement over the other nonextensible
editors used by everyone else.

	Steve Zimmerman