4 ms·

http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

by Ologn 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
smacktoward 12y ago
This explains why XEmacs came into existence, not what compelling reasons there are to use it over GNU Emacs in 2014, which was the original question.
- Ologn 12y ago
  Unless my eyes are faulty, the statement I see up top is "I could not get what the difference are between GNU Emacs and XEmacs."
- RickHull 12y ago
  The original question is why it still exists. The answer is simply that XEmacs still has users. I would guess that only the tiniest sliver are "new" users. Some of the existing users are surely developers who continue to maintain the project, which at this point should only be of historical interest to potential new emacs users.
na85 12y ago
Mostly what I got from these emails is that RMS is a real jackass.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  He is extremely rigid. The strangest things here to me are RMS's allergy to data abstraction (insisting on using bare Lisp objects for things like events) and his excessive parsimony in design (unifying keymaps and menubars, when the only thing they have in common is that they're both trees). Neither of these reflects the software engineering practices that were taught to most of us at MIT. Perhaps he picked it up from hanging around some of the older hackers who were used to working with extremely limited machine resources. Certainly in its early days, GNU Emacs was criticized for excessive resource consumption by people who were trying to run it on relatively small machines ("Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" was one joke I recall). Perhaps RMS was influenced by these criticisms; and probably, the Lucid developers did not feel quite so constrained, given their market. In any case, it's been a very long time since 8MB was a lot. It's funny to me now, when I occasionally use one of the fancy IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, to see how XEmacs is now the lightweight, fast choice by comparison. (And it loads in a 500MB log file in a couple of seconds -- try that with your IDE.)

http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

by Ologn 12y ago

http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

smacktoward 12y ago

This explains why XEmacs came into existence, not what compelling reasons there are to use it over GNU Emacs in 2014, which was the original question.

Ologn 12y ago
Unless my eyes are faulty, the statement I see up top is "I could not get what the difference are between GNU Emacs and XEmacs."
RickHull 12y ago
The original question is why it still exists. The answer is simply that XEmacs still has users. I would guess that only the tiniest sliver are "new" users. Some of the existing users are surely developers who continue to maintain the project, which at this point should only be of historical interest to potential new emacs users.

na85 12y ago

Mostly what I got from these emails is that RMS is a real jackass.

ScottBurson 12y ago
He is extremely rigid. The strangest things here to me are RMS's allergy to data abstraction (insisting on using bare Lisp objects for things like events) and his excessive parsimony in design (unifying keymaps and menubars, when the only thing they have in common is that they're both trees). Neither of these reflects the software engineering practices that were taught to most of us at MIT. Perhaps he picked it up from hanging around some of the older hackers who were used to working with extremely limited machine resources. Certainly in its early days, GNU Emacs was criticized for excessive resource consumption by people who were trying to run it on relatively small machines ("Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" was one joke I recall). Perhaps RMS was influenced by these criticisms; and probably, the Lucid developers did not feel quite so constrained, given their market. In any case, it's been a very long time since 8MB was a lot. It's funny to me now, when I occasionally use one of the fancy IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, to see how XEmacs is now the lightweight, fast choice by comparison. (And it loads in a 500MB log file in a couple of seconds -- try that with your IDE.)