Xref: utzoo unix-pc.general:758 comp.sys.att:3396 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!pacbell!ditka!amanue!cgh!manta!brant From: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes) Newsgroups: unix-pc.general,comp.sys.att Subject: Re: UNIXpc Gnu Emacs update (LONG) Message-ID: <367@manta.UUCP> Date: 1 Jun 88 15:25:04 GMT References: <364@manta.UUCP> <4891@ihlpf.ATT.COM> Reply-To: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes) Organization: Soul of the Gnu Machine, Philadelphia Lines: 57 In article <4891@ihlpf.ATT.COM> gmark@ihlpf.ATT.COM (Stewart) writes: >I've seen several postings requesting the whereabouts of >"Gnu" Emacs. Was just wondering if there was something special >about "Gnu" Emacs, or they just wanted some version of Emacs to >run on the UNIX-PC? [...] Better than >Gmacs (Gosling's Emacs)? Gnu Emacs (GE) has a unique referent, rather than being some random version of Emacs. It is one of several free software products distributed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) (which I will not even BEGIN to describe). GE is part of the Gnu project (GNU stands (recursively) for GNU's Not Unix), a project to develop a Unix-like (more or less) operating system that will run on a wide variety of machines and have freely distributed source code. Other Gnu Project products include GCC (the Gnu C Compiler), Gnu Bison (YACC replacement), Gnu Awk, GDB (symbolic debugger), Gnu Make, etc. Many of these run only on Vaxes and Suns at the moment (e.g., GDB, GCC++, Gnu ld). GE is mostly written and maintained by Richard M. Stallman (RMS), who also founded the FSF. RMS developed the Emacs concept while a student in the MIT AI Lab (I can look up the tech report ref if anyone is interested) and all Emacses trace their roots back to his original PDP-10 ITS Emacs. I haven't used Gosmacs for a long time, but many around Penn believe GE to be a strictly superior display editor (for whatever that's worth). There's a long file distributed with GE called GOSDIFFS that details the differences between GE and Gosmacs, too long to post, but I'd e-mail it on request. The main points about GE is that it's EASILY customizable using Emacs Lisp, all the source code (in C and Emacs Lisp) is available, it's very well documented, and it provides a large array of tools making it possible to do many things without having to jump to a shell (like reading mail, news, compiling programs you're editing). But editor preference is essentially a religious issue, so I'll let it go at that, hoping to avoid starting an editor flame war. GE does run on UNIXpc's, and I've found its performance to be as good as or better than that on my research VAX 785. The latest complete GE distribution is available for anonymous ARPAnet FTP from site prep.ai.mit.edu, in the file /u2/emacs/edist.tar.Z (about 4Mb in size). Anonymous UUCP access to the distribution is provided by osu-cis, but I'm not sure of the details; write to Bob Sutterfield (sutterfield@cis.ohio-state.edu, I think, or maybe bob@...) for details. For those who cannot go either route, I will put a slightly stripped-down version of the distribution on UNIXpc floppies by request, including compiled executables for those unfortunates without development kits. For those who can get the distribution elsewhere, I will e-mail on request the patches to enable GE support of the UNIXpc mouse, the UNIXpc keypad definitions, and the changes to m-7300.h for building a magic 0413 emacs executable. Sorry to run on so long folks, but I thought I might as well answer a whole bunch of questions all at once. -- Brant Cheikes University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science ARPA: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, UUCP: ...drexel!manta!brant