8 ms·

Epsilon Programmer's Editor

82 points by valera_rozuvan 10y ago

klodolph 10y ago
How many licenses are still being sold? I see that the last update was in May 2006.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > 4 August 2016 New Evaluation Version of Epsilon 13.12 Available. > 19 September 2011 Epsilon 13.12 update available, compatible with OS X 10.7 Lion. Those aren't updates?
  - stevefeinstein 10y ago
    Not really. They put an eval version up which expires. They then upload a new build that pushes the expiration out. Repeat every few months.
mcphage 10y ago
Still being sold for $250 != still being bought for $250, as a lot of people who try selling things on eBay find out to their dismay.
- dietrichepp 10y ago
  Our volume is zero, but we make up for it with large margins.
andyhnj 10y ago
I've heard of Epsilon, but never used it. Back in the days when I actually paid for text editors, my favorite was Multi-Edit (http://multieditsoftware.com/ http://multieditsoftware.com/). I remember UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com/ http://www.ultraedit.com/) being pretty popular too. Nowadays, whatever work I'm not doing in Visual Studio is being done in Notepad++.
- rhizome 10y ago
  UltraEdit, the TextMate of the 90s!
- limeyy 10y ago
  MultiEdit DOS version was a great tool indeed. looking at the activity of their forum, things are not very lively.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  Speaking of bygone editors, I still have (very) fond memories of using QEdit (later TSE (The Semware Editor)) in my DOS-centric early '90s larval hacking days. Looks like they still sell it for $45 a pop, I don't think the website (http://www.semware.com http://www.semware.com) has changed much in the intervening 20 years though. :)
notJim 10y ago
The order form has this line "Note: As of 19 February 2016, CDs are temporarily out of stock. If you need a CD please email us for estimated availability.", which might imply that someone bought themselves a CD copy of this editor back in February.
sctb 10y ago
We changed the title from “A mighty editor still being sold after 30 years for $250”, which breaks the HN guidelines for editorializing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- smacktoward 10y ago
  And now the headline provides absolutely no indication of why it's an interesting link. Sigh. Why not just strike "mighty" and leave it as "An editor still being sold after 30 years for $250"?
  - weatherlight 10y ago
    ^ what he said
  - zem 10y ago
    strongly agree with this. there's a difference between editorialising and having a title that tells you why the link was posted in the first place (and the fact that it's "a programmer's editor" is not it)
  - sctb 10y ago
    From the guidelines: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. The long-standing policy is to represent the submitted content as accurately as possible and let readers pick out what's interesting to them, not what the submitter found interesting. The comment thread is the place to express one's opinion on the content.
- valera_rozuvan 10y ago
  I understand now. I see the wrong in my ways.
rcb 10y ago
I'm a 20+ year daily gnu/x emacs user and purchased a copy of Epsilon in July after demoing it for a couple weeks. Since then I've been coding in Epsilon daily (Linux/C++): What I love about it: 1) it's VERY fast, 2) the documentation is phenomenal, 3) the defaults are sane, and the configurable options are well thought out, 4) rock-solid stable. It's a beautiful piece of software and I've really enjoyed using it. No regrets on the purchase. To me it was worth the $250.
raarts 10y ago
I used epsilon for all my programming work until I discovered vi in '93. It ran on dos, and OS/2. United had something similar in uemacs. I used EEL the extension language to write a log of all I did to help refreshing my memory when I filled by time sheet. It was a great editor with a built in shell, windowing and whatnot. Both on DOS and OS/2 I ran the MKS Toolkit to emulate a Unix environment and it fit right in. Happy user. No idea it was still on sale.
jupiter2 10y ago
For some reason, I find it gratifying that this operation has been in business (more or less) for 32 years. I can feel a strong sense of pride in the application he's built and still seeing it out there. Whatever few orders he gets is essentially keeping the site running and providing online support to those few still using his wares. Each order gets you copies for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OS/2 and DOS versions. Must be fun to have a long-standing project that you can go to that keeps you in touch with both newer and older OSes too.
PeCaN 10y ago
Its extension language looks very interesting. It looks very powerful while having domain-specific features (I've noticed ‘user’, ‘command’, and ‘save_var’ keywords). See e.g. http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e Also, the demo is extremely snappy. Shame it doesn't seem to have vi emulation (unless I missed it?) or org-mode, both of which are killer features of emacs for me.
- zem 10y ago
  as text editor extension languages go, i really liked aurora's [old dos-era editor with an emacs-like core + soft layer architecture]. it was pascal-like, and really pleasant to work with. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html
zeveb 10y ago
I almost want to buy a copy just to give the guy kudos for keeping with it for all these years. Pretty impressive array of platforms and features for something with that old a history!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rbryan13 10y ago
Epsilon is great. Let me offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It's a secret weapon, an unfair advantage we have, those of us in the know. I was so happy to come upon it as a sadly ex-Symbolics-ZMacs user (and ex-MIT-TECO-Emacs user) when first confronted with a 286 system, and I have have been using it ever since. I buy a few copies every few years, typically for team members who wonder what's that magic I keep using. At my present company, I fought (and won) a three-month battle with the Software Standards Committee to be allowed to install it. As a Windows developer I routinely do all editing in Epsilon, switching to Visual Studio only to compile and debug. To draft this very message, I switched away from my web browser to Epsilon. Steven Doerfler provides great customer service on the very rare occasion that I need to turn to him. If you have any emacs in your soul, buy Epsilon. Now.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Why do you prefer it over regular Emacs? How is it better enough to make up for the much larger collection of extensions for Emacs? The demo for me just felt like a snappier Emacs clone.
  - rbryan13 10y ago
    Well, the first N specific things that come to mind have already been expressed pretty well by previous comments here (including your own "snappier"). The next 10*N things are already expressed pretty well in the 2009-format-but-still-valid-content marketroid material on lugaru.com. As it happens, I haven't found a need to explore a universe of community extensions because right out of the "box" Epsilon does nearly everything I need, and my few personal extensions take care of the rest. Beyond that, I no longer care to engage in yet another emacs religious war, and emacs does not need any bad-mouthing from me.
    - Elrac 10y ago
      I can understand and respect that you're reluctant to write an endorsement of Epsilon and/or a comparison with Emacs. But I'd like to let you know that while starting to read your comment I was looking forward to just that, and now find myself a bit disappointed that you're not sharing some reasons for your enthusiasm. I was a big fan of Epsilon back in the days when it was an alternative to WordStar and I think I still own an original (paid) copy on floppy disks, but I'm not familiar enough (any more) with its feature set to meaningfully answer the question of what qualifies it above Emacs. Personally, I'm considering paying $250 just for the nostalgia value. And I love fast editors with an uncluttered surface. The ability to edit arbitrarily long lines and binaries is certainly a plus. But I would appreciate, if you'd reconsider, hearing more arguments to knock me off the fence.
drfuchs 10y ago
In Epsilon 2.0 (1985) for MS-DOS, you could Cntl-X Cntl-M to get a buffer that had a real, live shell in it, where you could start up background compiles and such, and still be able to edit your other buffers live. This was a miracle! (DOS could barely run a single process, with certainly no preemptive scheduling; and even if you dreamed of multi-tasking, there was a maximum of 640k of memory, with nothing virtual about it).
kabdib 10y ago
I've been using Epsilon for 25+ years. It's great, and well worth the money I have spent on the updates over the past few decades. It's my go-to editor. I can get along in vanilla Emacs, but Epsilon is a lot friendlier on a Windows box. There's not much I would change on the Windows version (better multiple monitor support might be interesting0. I would pay dear money for better MacOS support.
- robobro 10y ago
  Yeah, it looks way better than vanilla emacs on the Windows version.
azeirah 10y ago
Because of all the positive comments I decided to try the editor. For all of you evangalizing this editor, why do keybindings like "F9, Ctrl-X U" make sense for common tasks like undo? Press F9, release and then quickly press ctrl-x, release and then press u. Even during my short time with emacs did I not hurt my fingers this much
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Just to point out, the binding for undo in emacs is C-X u.
  - lgas 10y ago
    Actually, the primary binding is 'C-/', with 'C-x u' and 'C-_' as alaises. The 'C-x u' alias exists because it's easier for new users to remember and the 'C-_' alias exists because that's what some terminals send when you press 'C-/'.
    - handojin 10y ago
      cough M-x cua-mode cough...
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Makes a good set of training wheels, sure. I used it for a couple of years. I did end up with undo still on C-z after turning off cua-mode, because I use graphical frames and never want to suspend anyway. But it's not really a help: the C-/ C-? pair is much more convenient, and for nontrivial undoing I'm navigating a state tree anyway.
stevefeinstein 10y ago
Been using Epsilon daily since 1989. I've been disillusioned lately that it's not been updated for quite some time. The developer is still quite responsive though, and even though I use it less than I used to, I still use it every day. I was hoping to see a native Mac version rather than the version that depends on X.
- kabdib 10y ago
  +1 for better Mac support. I don't know if the author has any inclination to do an update, but I would definitely re-buy the editor if the Mac version didn't depend on X.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
KirinDave 10y ago
The OSX deployment not being a "verified developer" shuts down anyone in an enterprise environment. That's too bad, I wanted to try it at work.
- kragen 10y ago
  That's interesting, and fairly dystopian — you're not allowed to run any software on your computer that isn't signed by Apple? Can you install, say, VirtualBox?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Leaving aside the "signed by Apple" angle, I find it ironic in modern companies that many of them spend a lot of money finding people to work for them, then they spend money paying those people, and then they spend more money making it as hard as humanly possible for those people to do their jobs.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    Yes. But of course, I'd rather not use a virtualization layer on OSX. It simply doesn't work well. Ultimately, "Verified developers" is a good idea for corporate machines. It doesn't stop attacks, but it raises the cost of attacks. That's really what security is about these days.
tonyle 10y ago
Sometimes programmers need to look at unusual files: binary files, very big files, odd data files. Epsilon was designed without the limits of other editors, so it can handle these kinds of jobs, as well as ordinary files. For example, with Epsilon, lines can be as long as you like. This text editor gets it. Such a contrast to some of the editors we have today where anything over a few megabytes is an edge case not worth fixing.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Really? I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM. (At least it worked though, coughAtomcough.) And more importantly it has no unicode support whatsoever as far as I can tell (any non-ASCII characters I typed showed up as ?).
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    > I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM. And what you expect here? Other editors usually take 2x to 3x of file size.
    - NuSkooler 10y ago
      For massive text files, this is your friend: http://jujusoft.com/jujuedit/ http://jujusoft.com/jujuedit/
    - nightcracker 10y ago
      mmap'd files.
      - ComodoHacker 10y ago
        mmap doesn't help much if you do syntax highlighting or other formatting.
- actuallyalys 10y ago
  Wouldn't a hex editor be a better choice for binary files and odd data files? Are there benefits besides the ability to handle large files and long lines?
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I'll stick with Emacs for now. $250 is a bit heavy for those of us with little disposable income. In addition, I fail to see the advantage of this over Emacs: Emacs already has pretty much all of Epsilon's features, and a larger community. Furthermore, I highly doubt that its extensibility features are as extensive. It's kinda cool, though. Sidenote: why do I always see the HN headlines up to a day ahead in the previous headlines? Is this just thing everybody sees? Or am I just really lucky picking my threads?
- ww520 10y ago
  Epsilon is very fast, like coming up in a second. Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute. You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. With epsilon you can start it on a file quickly and move on.
  - robobro 10y ago
    one word: emacsclient
    - sooheon 10y ago
      Only use emacs, not epsilon, but someone above mentioned that it can handle long lines. Emacs, despite being a good editor, is not performant in such cases.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        You can do some optmizations to Emacs line handling. emacs -nw can help, I think. But by the time you've really hit Emacs' limit, you should have split your line anyway. And there is always nano, for the truly desparate.
        GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        How does "-nw" help with long lines?
kelvin0 10y ago
Lugaru is from the french word 'Loup-Garou' which means Werewolf. I wonder where he got the idea to name the software company as such? Also it speaks volumes that no one has yet commented on appearance of the website, I guess the target audience is not the 'get the latest hip named thing' kinda crowd.
- pschastain 10y ago
  From the site (http://www.lugaru.com/why-lugaru.html http://www.lugaru.com/why-lugaru.html): 'Sometimes people ask what our company name, Lugaru, means. It's actually a phonetic spelling of the French word for werewolf, "loup-garou". One day in 1984, after finally turning off the computers and noticing the sun had come up, we decided this might be an appropriate name for our new company.'
kragen 10y ago
I think "ϵpsilon" was my first programmer's editor, although I think I had previously written programs in EDT, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, QBASIC, GW-BASIC, ZBASIC, IBM Basic, Applesoft Basic, WordStar, and a thing called Video Scribe for HDOS. It was so much better than nearly all of the alternatives, even though I didn't use its IDE features. It was super helpful to me to have used ϵpsilon when I got my first Unix account in 1993, because I already knew how to use Emacs, almost. Some of the basic keybindings (like exiting and changing windows) were different enough to be an obstacle. And then I never looked back. From then on I used my 286 to run Procomm+ and Vernon Buerg's LIST.COM, not to write programs on. Sorry, ϵpsilon. Emacs is an entire universe. (Since then I've also programmed in vim, IDEA, Eclipse, some prototype editors I've written, Arduino, XCode, Notepad, OpenSCAD, and browsers, mostly in order to collaborate with other people and occasionally because they are better integrated with one or another more or less shitty system than Emacs is. But Emacs is pretty much the most convenient way to program for me.)
massysett 10y ago
The GNU Emacs website does a better sales job...which is interesting because unlike this product, GNU does not even need to sell anything. When looking through the website I see Windows 95-ish screenshots, pages that say they have not been updated in over five years, and little description of what it does beyond saying it's like EMACS. No clue at all about why I should use this rather than one of the other free-beer editors out there. And now I read these comments and see it costs $250? Why??
- notalaser 10y ago
  > little description of what it does beyond saying it's like EMACS. If you'd bother to read, instead of expecting a virtual salesman to spoonfeed you make-believe thrash, you'd notice that a summary of "what it does" ( http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html ) and the damn manual, where you can find everything it does, not just "a little description" ( http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html , http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon-manual.html http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon-manual.html ), are linked right on the frontpage.
  - janoc 10y ago
    Sorry, but that's just nonsense. If you want to actually sell something, I would expect to have at least a summary of main selling points right there, at the front page. Expecting the potential buyer to dig through the manual to even learn what the software actually is beyond the "emacs like editor" is ridiculous. For me it just means it is yet another editor for obscure OSes (OS/2 ?), one of thousands on the market, and that I am not going to consider spending money on it when the authors can't be even bothered to tell me why should I do so. The product could be technically superior than everything else and the best thing since sliced bread, but it means little if you don't tell people about it. That's marketing 101. Compare with e.g. SublimeText website - the key stuff is right there, even animated (!): https://www.sublimetext.com/ https://www.sublimetext.com/ Or Atom: https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/ Or even Emacs: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ Even Vim's web site starts with a short summary: http://www.vim.org/ http://www.vim.org/ Unfortunately, many project websites (both open source and commercial) are like that - front page filled with jargon and random stuff but you won't find a short paragraph summarizing what the software actually is for and its main features for people not already familiar with it.
zoom6628 10y ago
Very happy to see someone keep an editor going as a commercial product for so many years. I think this is a good example of 'craft'. There are a few gems out there that once you stumble over them, they become part of your toolbox and are just so much better than anything else for the work that you do, that you stick with them. This looks to me to be an example of that. Not all IDEs suit all people. Apart from feature set one also has to consider style and operations. Im most happy when i find the features+style+operations match to the job at hand. And that is why i turn to Notepad++ when i have to ferret around in files of different types, awk when i have to mess with text/log files. I turn to VS only when i have to code something in C#, use PyCharm for python things. Bottom line when an IDE 'just clicks' for you then its a wonderfully productive tool.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 10y ago
(Perhaps a bit off-topic) Another non-free editor that's been around for a while is BBEdit. It's always been Mac-only, unfortunately.
statictype 10y ago
I love how there is a prominent link explaining Year 2000 issues.
xvilka 10y ago
I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project. They listed 3 main advantages: "The first immediate advantage is that Elisp will execute faster, because Guile uses a compiler tower with many optimization passes and ultimately compiles to Guile VM bytecode, which is more efficient than current Elisp bytecode. In the future, Guile is likely to implement some forms of native JIT as well as AOT compilation as well. A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are capable of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved defstruct), CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module system, hygienic macros, multiple-value returns, and threads. A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp code, no matter what language they’re implemented in, because different languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if they’re both a Lisp. C-implemented functions (“subrs” in Elisp terminology), Elisp functions, Scheme procedures, etc. all compile to the same “procedure” data type, which may appear in Elisp symbols’ function-slots, be bound to Scheme variables, and are otherwise first-class objects in both environments which can be funcalled or applied explicitly or by the language’s normal syntactic way of calling functions. Similarly, other data types are unified between the languages; Elisp integers and exact Scheme integers, inexact Scheme numbers and Elisp floats, Elisp cons cells and Scheme pairs, symbols, etc. are the same data type across the languages. (Strings are an exception though; see below.) Therefore one can generally use a library written in another language as if it were written in the same language." And looks like there is some progress still: [2] Here is the current TODO list [3], if someone wants to help. [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-03/msg00028.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-03/msg00... [3] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo
- wtbob 10y ago
  > I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project. I really really hope they don't and use Common Lisp to achieve the same end. Running emacs in a Common Lisp like SBCL implementation means that it will be natively compiled, with an extremely intelligent compiler. > A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are capable of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved defstruct), CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module system, hygienic macros, multiple-value returns, and threads. Common Lisp has infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers and imaginary numbers. It has DEFSTRUCT. It has CLOS (obviously). Every Unix Lisp I'm aware of has an FFI. Continuations are actually a problem when it comes to e.g. UNWIND-PROTECT. Common Lisp has packages and an excellent module system in ASDF3. It has hygienic macro libraries, and natively supports the more-powerful DEFMACRO. It supports multiple-value returns. BORDEAUX-THREADS is an excellent portable thread library. > A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp code, no matter what language they’re implemented in, because different languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if they’re both a Lisp. Common Lisp has many excellent libraries available via Quicklisp. Scheme is IMHO a broken language: distinguishing NIL and #f; only have one namespace; continuations; not allowing (cdr nil); not having a native object system; not having a rich type and class library; not having read macros. It was an interesting experiment, but the effort spent on Schemes would have been better spent improving Lisp. Lisp is far closer to elisp, and is a better language to boot.

How many licenses are still being sold? I see that the last update was in May 2006.

vonmoltke 10y ago
> 4 August 2016 New Evaluation Version of Epsilon 13.12 Available. > 19 September 2011 Epsilon 13.12 update available, compatible with OS X 10.7 Lion. Those aren't updates?
- stevefeinstein 10y ago
  Not really. They put an eval version up which expires. They then upload a new build that pushes the expiration out. Repeat every few months.

Still being sold for $250 != still being bought for $250, as a lot of people who try selling things on eBay find out to their dismay.

dietrichepp 10y ago
Our volume is zero, but we make up for it with large margins.

andyhnj 10y ago

I've heard of Epsilon, but never used it. Back in the days when I actually paid for text editors, my favorite was Multi-Edit (http://multieditsoftware.com/ http://multieditsoftware.com/). I remember UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com/ http://www.ultraedit.com/) being pretty popular too. Nowadays, whatever work I'm not doing in Visual Studio is being done in Notepad++.

rhizome 10y ago
UltraEdit, the TextMate of the 90s!
limeyy 10y ago
MultiEdit DOS version was a great tool indeed. looking at the activity of their forum, things are not very lively.
mwfunk 10y ago
Speaking of bygone editors, I still have (very) fond memories of using QEdit (later TSE (The Semware Editor)) in my DOS-centric early '90s larval hacking days. Looks like they still sell it for $45 a pop, I don't think the website (http://www.semware.com http://www.semware.com) has changed much in the intervening 20 years though. :)

notJim 10y ago

The order form has this line "Note: As of 19 February 2016, CDs are temporarily out of stock. If you need a CD please email us for estimated availability.", which might imply that someone bought themselves a CD copy of this editor back in February.

sctb 10y ago

We changed the title from “A mighty editor still being sold after 30 years for $250”, which breaks the HN guidelines for editorializing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

smacktoward 10y ago
And now the headline provides absolutely no indication of why it's an interesting link. Sigh. Why not just strike "mighty" and leave it as "An editor still being sold after 30 years for $250"?
- weatherlight 10y ago
  ^ what he said
- zem 10y ago
  strongly agree with this. there's a difference between editorialising and having a title that tells you why the link was posted in the first place (and the fact that it's "a programmer's editor" is not it)
- sctb 10y ago
  From the guidelines: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. The long-standing policy is to represent the submitted content as accurately as possible and let readers pick out what's interesting to them, not what the submitter found interesting. The comment thread is the place to express one's opinion on the content.
valera_rozuvan 10y ago
I understand now. I see the wrong in my ways.

rcb 10y ago

I'm a 20+ year daily gnu/x emacs user and purchased a copy of Epsilon in July after demoing it for a couple weeks. Since then I've been coding in Epsilon daily (Linux/C++): What I love about it: 1) it's VERY fast, 2) the documentation is phenomenal, 3) the defaults are sane, and the configurable options are well thought out, 4) rock-solid stable. It's a beautiful piece of software and I've really enjoyed using it. No regrets on the purchase. To me it was worth the $250.

raarts 10y ago

I used epsilon for all my programming work until I discovered vi in '93. It ran on dos, and OS/2. United had something similar in uemacs. I used EEL the extension language to write a log of all I did to help refreshing my memory when I filled by time sheet. It was a great editor with a built in shell, windowing and whatnot. Both on DOS and OS/2 I ran the MKS Toolkit to emulate a Unix environment and it fit right in. Happy user. No idea it was still on sale.

jupiter2 10y ago

For some reason, I find it gratifying that this operation has been in business (more or less) for 32 years. I can feel a strong sense of pride in the application he's built and still seeing it out there. Whatever few orders he gets is essentially keeping the site running and providing online support to those few still using his wares. Each order gets you copies for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OS/2 and DOS versions. Must be fun to have a long-standing project that you can go to that keeps you in touch with both newer and older OSes too.

PeCaN 10y ago

Its extension language looks very interesting. It looks very powerful while having domain-specific features (I've noticed ‘user’, ‘command’, and ‘save_var’ keywords). See e.g. http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e Also, the demo is extremely snappy. Shame it doesn't seem to have vi emulation (unless I missed it?) or org-mode, both of which are killer features of emacs for me.

zem 10y ago
as text editor extension languages go, i really liked aurora's [old dos-era editor with an emacs-like core + soft layer architecture]. it was pascal-like, and really pleasant to work with. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html

zeveb 10y ago

I almost want to buy a copy just to give the guy kudos for keeping with it for all these years. Pretty impressive array of platforms and features for something with that old a history!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rbryan13 10y ago

Epsilon is great. Let me offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It's a secret weapon, an unfair advantage we have, those of us in the know. I was so happy to come upon it as a sadly ex-Symbolics-ZMacs user (and ex-MIT-TECO-Emacs user) when first confronted with a 286 system, and I have have been using it ever since. I buy a few copies every few years, typically for team members who wonder what's that magic I keep using. At my present company, I fought (and won) a three-month battle with the Software Standards Committee to be allowed to install it. As a Windows developer I routinely do all editing in Epsilon, switching to Visual Studio only to compile and debug. To draft this very message, I switched away from my web browser to Epsilon. Steven Doerfler provides great customer service on the very rare occasion that I need to turn to him. If you have any emacs in your soul, buy Epsilon. Now.

PeCaN 10y ago
Why do you prefer it over regular Emacs? How is it better enough to make up for the much larger collection of extensions for Emacs? The demo for me just felt like a snappier Emacs clone.
- rbryan13 10y ago
  Well, the first N specific things that come to mind have already been expressed pretty well by previous comments here (including your own "snappier"). The next 10*N things are already expressed pretty well in the 2009-format-but-still-valid-content marketroid material on lugaru.com. As it happens, I haven't found a need to explore a universe of community extensions because right out of the "box" Epsilon does nearly everything I need, and my few personal extensions take care of the rest. Beyond that, I no longer care to engage in yet another emacs religious war, and emacs does not need any bad-mouthing from me.
  - Elrac 10y ago
    I can understand and respect that you're reluctant to write an endorsement of Epsilon and/or a comparison with Emacs. But I'd like to let you know that while starting to read your comment I was looking forward to just that, and now find myself a bit disappointed that you're not sharing some reasons for your enthusiasm. I was a big fan of Epsilon back in the days when it was an alternative to WordStar and I think I still own an original (paid) copy on floppy disks, but I'm not familiar enough (any more) with its feature set to meaningfully answer the question of what qualifies it above Emacs. Personally, I'm considering paying $250 just for the nostalgia value. And I love fast editors with an uncluttered surface. The ability to edit arbitrarily long lines and binaries is certainly a plus. But I would appreciate, if you'd reconsider, hearing more arguments to knock me off the fence.

drfuchs 10y ago

In Epsilon 2.0 (1985) for MS-DOS, you could Cntl-X Cntl-M to get a buffer that had a real, live shell in it, where you could start up background compiles and such, and still be able to edit your other buffers live. This was a miracle! (DOS could barely run a single process, with certainly no preemptive scheduling; and even if you dreamed of multi-tasking, there was a maximum of 640k of memory, with nothing virtual about it).

kabdib 10y ago

I've been using Epsilon for 25+ years. It's great, and well worth the money I have spent on the updates over the past few decades. It's my go-to editor. I can get along in vanilla Emacs, but Epsilon is a lot friendlier on a Windows box. There's not much I would change on the Windows version (better multiple monitor support might be interesting0. I would pay dear money for better MacOS support.

robobro 10y ago
Yeah, it looks way better than vanilla emacs on the Windows version.

azeirah 10y ago

Because of all the positive comments I decided to try the editor. For all of you evangalizing this editor, why do keybindings like "F9, Ctrl-X U" make sense for common tasks like undo? Press F9, release and then quickly press ctrl-x, release and then press u. Even during my short time with emacs did I not hurt my fingers this much

thaumasiotes 10y ago
Just to point out, the binding for undo in emacs is C-X u.
- lgas 10y ago
  Actually, the primary binding is 'C-/', with 'C-x u' and 'C-_' as alaises. The 'C-x u' alias exists because it's easier for new users to remember and the 'C-_' alias exists because that's what some terminals send when you press 'C-/'.
  - handojin 10y ago
    cough M-x cua-mode cough...
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Makes a good set of training wheels, sure. I used it for a couple of years. I did end up with undo still on C-z after turning off cua-mode, because I use graphical frames and never want to suspend anyway. But it's not really a help: the C-/ C-? pair is much more convenient, and for nontrivial undoing I'm navigating a state tree anyway.

stevefeinstein 10y ago

Been using Epsilon daily since 1989. I've been disillusioned lately that it's not been updated for quite some time. The developer is still quite responsive though, and even though I use it less than I used to, I still use it every day. I was hoping to see a native Mac version rather than the version that depends on X.

kabdib 10y ago
+1 for better Mac support. I don't know if the author has any inclination to do an update, but I would definitely re-buy the editor if the Mac version didn't depend on X.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

KirinDave 10y ago

The OSX deployment not being a "verified developer" shuts down anyone in an enterprise environment. That's too bad, I wanted to try it at work.

kragen 10y ago
That's interesting, and fairly dystopian — you're not allowed to run any software on your computer that isn't signed by Apple? Can you install, say, VirtualBox?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Leaving aside the "signed by Apple" angle, I find it ironic in modern companies that many of them spend a lot of money finding people to work for them, then they spend money paying those people, and then they spend more money making it as hard as humanly possible for those people to do their jobs.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  Yes. But of course, I'd rather not use a virtualization layer on OSX. It simply doesn't work well. Ultimately, "Verified developers" is a good idea for corporate machines. It doesn't stop attacks, but it raises the cost of attacks. That's really what security is about these days.

tonyle 10y ago

Sometimes programmers need to look at unusual files: binary files, very big files, odd data files. Epsilon was designed without the limits of other editors, so it can handle these kinds of jobs, as well as ordinary files. For example, with Epsilon, lines can be as long as you like. This text editor gets it. Such a contrast to some of the editors we have today where anything over a few megabytes is an edge case not worth fixing.

PeCaN 10y ago
Really? I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM. (At least it worked though, coughAtomcough.) And more importantly it has no unicode support whatsoever as far as I can tell (any non-ASCII characters I typed showed up as ?).
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  > I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM. And what you expect here? Other editors usually take 2x to 3x of file size.
  - NuSkooler 10y ago
    For massive text files, this is your friend: http://jujusoft.com/jujuedit/ http://jujusoft.com/jujuedit/
  - nightcracker 10y ago
    mmap'd files.
    - ComodoHacker 10y ago
      mmap doesn't help much if you do syntax highlighting or other formatting.
actuallyalys 10y ago
Wouldn't a hex editor be a better choice for binary files and odd data files? Are there benefits besides the ability to handle large files and long lines?

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I'll stick with Emacs for now. $250 is a bit heavy for those of us with little disposable income. In addition, I fail to see the advantage of this over Emacs: Emacs already has pretty much all of Epsilon's features, and a larger community. Furthermore, I highly doubt that its extensibility features are as extensive. It's kinda cool, though. Sidenote: why do I always see the HN headlines up to a day ahead in the previous headlines? Is this just thing everybody sees? Or am I just really lucky picking my threads?

ww520 10y ago
Epsilon is very fast, like coming up in a second. Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute. You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. With epsilon you can start it on a file quickly and move on.
- robobro 10y ago
  one word: emacsclient
  - sooheon 10y ago
    Only use emacs, not epsilon, but someone above mentioned that it can handle long lines. Emacs, despite being a good editor, is not performant in such cases.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      You can do some optmizations to Emacs line handling. emacs -nw can help, I think. But by the time you've really hit Emacs' limit, you should have split your line anyway. And there is always nano, for the truly desparate.
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        How does "-nw" help with long lines?

kelvin0 10y ago

Lugaru is from the french word 'Loup-Garou' which means Werewolf. I wonder where he got the idea to name the software company as such? Also it speaks volumes that no one has yet commented on appearance of the website, I guess the target audience is not the 'get the latest hip named thing' kinda crowd.

pschastain 10y ago
From the site (http://www.lugaru.com/why-lugaru.html http://www.lugaru.com/why-lugaru.html): 'Sometimes people ask what our company name, Lugaru, means. It's actually a phonetic spelling of the French word for werewolf, "loup-garou". One day in 1984, after finally turning off the computers and noticing the sun had come up, we decided this might be an appropriate name for our new company.'

kragen 10y ago

I think "ϵpsilon" was my first programmer's editor, although I think I had previously written programs in EDT, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, QBASIC, GW-BASIC, ZBASIC, IBM Basic, Applesoft Basic, WordStar, and a thing called Video Scribe for HDOS. It was so much better than nearly all of the alternatives, even though I didn't use its IDE features. It was super helpful to me to have used ϵpsilon when I got my first Unix account in 1993, because I already knew how to use Emacs, almost. Some of the basic keybindings (like exiting and changing windows) were different enough to be an obstacle. And then I never looked back. From then on I used my 286 to run Procomm+ and Vernon Buerg's LIST.COM, not to write programs on. Sorry, ϵpsilon. Emacs is an entire universe. (Since then I've also programmed in vim, IDEA, Eclipse, some prototype editors I've written, Arduino, XCode, Notepad, OpenSCAD, and browsers, mostly in order to collaborate with other people and occasionally because they are better integrated with one or another more or less shitty system than Emacs is. But Emacs is pretty much the most convenient way to program for me.)

massysett 10y ago

The GNU Emacs website does a better sales job...which is interesting because unlike this product, GNU does not even need to sell anything. When looking through the website I see Windows 95-ish screenshots, pages that say they have not been updated in over five years, and little description of what it does beyond saying it's like EMACS. No clue at all about why I should use this rather than one of the other free-beer editors out there. And now I read these comments and see it costs $250? Why??

notalaser 10y ago
> little description of what it does beyond saying it's like EMACS. If you'd bother to read, instead of expecting a virtual salesman to spoonfeed you make-believe thrash, you'd notice that a summary of "what it does" ( http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html ) and the damn manual, where you can find everything it does, not just "a little description" ( http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html , http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon-manual.html http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon-manual.html ), are linked right on the frontpage.
- janoc 10y ago
  Sorry, but that's just nonsense. If you want to actually sell something, I would expect to have at least a summary of main selling points right there, at the front page. Expecting the potential buyer to dig through the manual to even learn what the software actually is beyond the "emacs like editor" is ridiculous. For me it just means it is yet another editor for obscure OSes (OS/2 ?), one of thousands on the market, and that I am not going to consider spending money on it when the authors can't be even bothered to tell me why should I do so. The product could be technically superior than everything else and the best thing since sliced bread, but it means little if you don't tell people about it. That's marketing 101. Compare with e.g. SublimeText website - the key stuff is right there, even animated (!): https://www.sublimetext.com/ https://www.sublimetext.com/ Or Atom: https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/ Or even Emacs: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ Even Vim's web site starts with a short summary: http://www.vim.org/ http://www.vim.org/ Unfortunately, many project websites (both open source and commercial) are like that - front page filled with jargon and random stuff but you won't find a short paragraph summarizing what the software actually is for and its main features for people not already familiar with it.

zoom6628 10y ago

Very happy to see someone keep an editor going as a commercial product for so many years. I think this is a good example of 'craft'. There are a few gems out there that once you stumble over them, they become part of your toolbox and are just so much better than anything else for the work that you do, that you stick with them. This looks to me to be an example of that. Not all IDEs suit all people. Apart from feature set one also has to consider style and operations. Im most happy when i find the features+style+operations match to the job at hand. And that is why i turn to Notepad++ when i have to ferret around in files of different types, awk when i have to mess with text/log files. I turn to VS only when i have to code something in C#, use PyCharm for python things. Bottom line when an IDE 'just clicks' for you then its a wonderfully productive tool.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 10y ago

(Perhaps a bit off-topic) Another non-free editor that's been around for a while is BBEdit. It's always been Mac-only, unfortunately.

statictype 10y ago

I love how there is a prominent link explaining Year 2000 issues.

xvilka 10y ago

I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project. They listed 3 main advantages: "The first immediate advantage is that Elisp will execute faster, because Guile uses a compiler tower with many optimization passes and ultimately compiles to Guile VM bytecode, which is more efficient than current Elisp bytecode. In the future, Guile is likely to implement some forms of native JIT as well as AOT compilation as well. A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are capable of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved defstruct), CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module system, hygienic macros, multiple-value returns, and threads. A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp code, no matter what language they’re implemented in, because different languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if they’re both a Lisp. C-implemented functions (“subrs” in Elisp terminology), Elisp functions, Scheme procedures, etc. all compile to the same “procedure” data type, which may appear in Elisp symbols’ function-slots, be bound to Scheme variables, and are otherwise first-class objects in both environments which can be funcalled or applied explicitly or by the language’s normal syntactic way of calling functions. Similarly, other data types are unified between the languages; Elisp integers and exact Scheme integers, inexact Scheme numbers and Elisp floats, Elisp cons cells and Scheme pairs, symbols, etc. are the same data type across the languages. (Strings are an exception though; see below.) Therefore one can generally use a library written in another language as if it were written in the same language." And looks like there is some progress still: [2] Here is the current TODO list [3], if someone wants to help. [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-03/msg00028.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-03/msg00... [3] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo

wtbob 10y ago
> I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project. I really really hope they don't and use Common Lisp to achieve the same end. Running emacs in a Common Lisp like SBCL implementation means that it will be natively compiled, with an extremely intelligent compiler. > A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are capable of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved defstruct), CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module system, hygienic macros, multiple-value returns, and threads. Common Lisp has infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers and imaginary numbers. It has DEFSTRUCT. It has CLOS (obviously). Every Unix Lisp I'm aware of has an FFI. Continuations are actually a problem when it comes to e.g. UNWIND-PROTECT. Common Lisp has packages and an excellent module system in ASDF3. It has hygienic macro libraries, and natively supports the more-powerful DEFMACRO. It supports multiple-value returns. BORDEAUX-THREADS is an excellent portable thread library. > A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp code, no matter what language they’re implemented in, because different languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if they’re both a Lisp. Common Lisp has many excellent libraries available via Quicklisp. Scheme is IMHO a broken language: distinguishing NIL and #f; only have one namespace; continuations; not allowing (cdr nil); not having a native object system; not having a rich type and class library; not having read macros. It was an interesting experiment, but the effort spent on Schemes would have been better spent improving Lisp. Lisp is far closer to elisp, and is a better language to boot.