At 10:37 AM 3/16/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Paul,
>
>Do you prefer GNU NTemacs over Xemacs? I am somewhat new to this open
>source v. free software discussion (where have I been?!?). I surfed out
>to www.emacs.org page, but it site is down. It appears that
>organization may be undergoing a difference of opinions. Are those
>folks the same as the GNU folks? I'm early enough in the game where
>changing from Xemacs to GNU emacs won't effect me too terribly much. I
>was just wondering what your opinion was.
>
The schism between Gnu Emacs and XEmacs was a bitter one (at least that's
what I hear, the breakup occurred before my time), the two versions are
maintained by separate organizations with separate mailing lists and
newsgroups, and it's my impression the relationship between the factions
remains strained.
Personally, I wish the schism had never occurred. It makes my life as a
package developer needlessly complicated as XEmacs does not add enough
value functionally (for me, anyway) to justify the bother of maintaining
compatibility with it. However, there are a lot of very reasonable and
smart people who are devoted to XEmacs and so it is worthwhile to maintain
compatibility if for no other reason than to ensure their involvement in
the JDE.
As for which version to use, on Unix they are pretty much interchangeable
functionally. So which one to use boils down to a matter of taste. If a
slick UI is important to you and you can live with the somewhat slower
response, then XEmacs is for you. Personally I prefer Emacs. On Windows, I
think you're crazy to use XEmacs unless you're an XEmacs developer or beta
tester. All you have to do is read the NT/XEmacs mailing list to realize
that NT/XEmacs is far from ready for prime time. A lot of people, including
myself, can't even get the latest release to start because (based on what
I've read on the list) the XEmacs memory allocation scheme creates fatal
conflicts with some common Windows drivers. Further, as I said, the XEmacs
subprocess launcher does not work correctly, which pretty much negates its
value as a tool for serious Java development, particularly if you're
developing a GUI app that needs to use standard I/O as well.
I'm not saying never use NT/XEmacs. I'm just saying wait until it
stabilizes (if you're primary goal is Java development and not development
of NT/XEmacs itself).
- Paul
