Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!news
From: news@steinmetz.ge.com (news)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: AMACS - ProDOS text editor for the Apple 2
Message-ID: <11339@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 23 Jun 88 17:24:53 GMT
References: <8806221454.AA19776@wheaties.ai.mit.edu> <8806221300.aa19421@SMOKE.BRL.ARPA>
Reply-To: elliott@glacier.steinmetz.ge.com (Jim Elliott)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 39

>availabe right now (my //gs is in Boston) but I can say that it is Emacs for
>the Apple // family of computers.
>
>Looking forward to more correspondence,
>
>    Brian Fox
From: elliott@glacier.steinmetz ()
Path: glacier!elliott

I must admit, I find this extremely intriguing. I wish you HAD posted
a blurb; I am a GNU-Emacs addict, and would LOVE to have an editor
on my apple which uses a similar kind of interface. That alone might
be enough to pay $80 for.

HOWEVER, I find it impossible to believe that AMACS is actually "Emacs
for the apple". For that to be true, it would have to be the most
amazing implementation feat ever. (Including all the lisp libraries,
Emacs amounts to many megs meg of source and object, and the Emacs I
am writing this posting with is using over a meg of VIRTUAL MEMORY right
now).  Not even an AT&T 3B2/300 (a small UNIX machine with 1 meg ram
and about 70 meg disk) can really deal with Emacs, so how on earth
could an apple with a 64K address space?

It seems much more likely to me that AMACS is a small subset of Emacs,
which, as I mentioned would certainly be very nice in itself. But I'm
sure Richard Stallman would prefer you not call it Emacs (or, at
least, would prefer that you call it a subset or "ersatz Emacs", as he
says...)

So, please clarify exactly what AMACS does. Is it extensible? How does
that work, with Emacs Lisp? Or is it just a text editor with
emacs-like key bindings? I'm very interested...
 .     .    .    .   .  . ... .  .   .    .    .     .    .   .   .  . ... . .

 Jim Elliott                       /    ...!seismo!uunet!steinmetz!crd!elliott
                                  /
 "Don't look, son, it's          /      Jim_Elliott%mts@itsgw.rpi.edu [school]
  a secular humanist!"          /  (or)     elliott@ge-crd.arpa	      [work]
 .     .    .    .   .  . ... .  .   .    .    .     .    .   .   .  . ... . .