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

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