It is true that having these two varieties of emacs causes more work
for the developer community. And I agree (based on personal experience)
with the pros and cons stated of using each. There has been, I believe,
a significally beneficial side effect of these two, oft competing,
emacs. Both camps have provided nifty enhancements that, in many cases,
were eventually adopted by the other camp. I would venture to guess
that without the competitiveness, different perspectives, and different
agendas of the two camps, many such enhancements might never have come
into existence. I think we see the same thing with and many varieties
of Linux. Just my two cents...
Chuck
-----Original Message-----
From: paulk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2000 10:28 AM
To: jeff.rancier
Cc: paulk; jde
Subject: FW: Re: NTEmacs
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
