Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!pro-carolina.cts.COM!delton From: delton@pro-carolina.cts.COM (Don Elton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: AMACS vs MicroEmacs Message-ID: <8712112336.AA18794@crash.cts.com> Date: 11 Dec 87 20:15:18 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: pnet01!pro-sol!pro-carolina!delton@nosc.MIL Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 46 Someone had posted a note on the net asking about the differences between Micro Emacs and AMACS, a commercial "Emacs clone" for ProDOS 8 written by Brian Fox. Here are Brian's comments: >From pro-sol!amacs Fri Dec 11 07:42:04 1987 Date: Fri, 11 Dec 87 07:24:16 PST Ppath: pro-carolina!delton From: amacs@pro-sol.cts.com (Brian Fox) Subject: AMACS and uEmacs I have used uEmacs on a macintosh. To put it blunty, it was not an editor that I would use. Much of the functionality was gone, with no way to get it back. There was no completion parsing (i.e. no M-X) which means that there is no way to rebind keys, or run init files. This means no Customization! Since one of the main goals for Emacs is provide customization at the user level, I feel that this editor loses. In addition, only a small subset of the commands generally available in real Emacs' are available in uEmacs. People have said "Yeah, but it's free...". My response to that is simple: If uEmacs was a full Emacs, like GNU Emacs, and had an extremely large number of centralized users (also like GNU Emacs) then the distribution of it as free software, available from one location would make sense. Since each person who gets uEmacs must either live with what is wrong with it, or fix it, we have an extremely large number of incompatible copies running around, and no reasonable standard. The price that I charge for AMACS is almost nominal; it pays for the materials used in packaging (I assume satisfied customers can vouch for that, and for the support of the software (if there is a bug, I fix it), and for the continued development of the software (I will add reasonable library requests, and that at a high rate of implementation). It also helps to offset the costs incurred for writing the next version of AMACS, which has a built in Lisp. Allright, I'm done flaming now. Brian Fox UUCP: [ ihnp4 sdcsvax nosc ] !crash!pro-carolina!delton ARPA: crash!pro-carolina!delton@nosc.mil INET: delton@pro-carolina.cts.com Pro-Carolina: 803-776-3936 (300-2400 baud, login as 'register')