[HECnet] emacs, was Re: installing LPs on RSX

[Dave McGuire]

On 04/30/2015 04:38 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>> EMACS would be nice but I haven't used it as much. It sounds like a
>>> chore to write or modify an editor in Pascal.
>>
>>    MicroEMACS was ported to RSX at one point, wasn't it?  Or did I dream
>> that?
> 
> Yes, it was. I didn't do the port, but some friends of mine did, many
> many years ago. I let it loose on the world though...
> But MicroEMACS have some issues, such as limits on how large files it
> can edit, as well as some limits in functionality. So I'm always looking
> for something better... :-)

  Sounds good to me.

  Many years ago, I worked as an MS-DOS software developer.  To put a
timeframe to this, the 16MHz 80286 was the current state of the PeeCee
art.  My computer at home ran Ultrix, and I loved emacs (GNU emacs
v18.59 I think) so I wanted something emacs-like under DOS.  Initially I
used MicroEMACS, which I liked, but as you said it does have some
limitations.

  I then ran into an editor called Freemacs.  It is the best editor I've
ever seen for MS-DOS.  It too has some limitations, but it is far more
flexible than MicroEMACS.  Much like GNU emacs, it is an editor core
that implements an interpreter for a language (called, in this case,
"Mint") in which higher-level functions are written.  Mint is sorta
Lisp-inspired but it's not very close to Lisp.

  I'd love to do an implementation of Freemacs for the PDP-11 at some point.

               -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA