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GNU Emacs for DJGPP (22.3 or 23.0.92) (Developers)

posted by Dennis, 04.04.2009, 22:23

> > Eighty Megabytes And Constantly Swapping :-)
>
> Oh, so now it's 80, eh? ;-)
Depending upon architecture...

> I just checked on this machine, 22.3 seems to use almost 8 MB just to
> start up (even though I compiled -Os to save space). Obviously would be a
> little painful on my 486 (640k + 7 MB extended RAM = not quite 8 MB), esp.
> since I'd probably be swapping like mad!
A little painful?

I'm currently playing with a Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 cicra 2002. It was a gift from a friend who had upgraded to a faster machine. She loved it, but said it was "slow slow slow". Well, no surprise. It has an 867mhz "Crusoe" processor, a 30GB HD, and a whole 256MB of RAM. It came from Fujitsu with WinXP Pro installed! XP wants 512MB minimum to think about performing. Can you say "Death by thrashing"? :-P

Right now it's dual booting Xubuntu and Puppy Linux, and performance is acceptable under Puppy. The big limit is a slow (even for when it was made) HD with low transfer rate. So things work when up, but can take a bit to load. Like, FF 3 takes 45 seconds to load/initialize, and Eclipse takes about a minute and a half.

> P.S. Was (crazily) curious about Win 3.1 Emacsen recently, found JED
> 0.98-4, notGNU, and heard (but didn't find) GNU Emacs 19.27 EMX for OS/2
> (sadly, I'll bet Steve knew where to find it, sigh) that supposedly ran
> under RSHELL (or DOS with RSX).
I have Jed and notGnu. If you want it, I may know where to find Eamcs for OS/2.

> > Gnu Emacs contributor Eric S. Raymond was going on a while back about
> > what Emacs got wrong, and comparing the virtues of Lisp and Python. I
> > suggested he rewrite Emacs to use Python as the underlying language
> > instead of Lisp, and the response was "Don't tempt me!"
>
> He claims to have written more Elisp code than anyone.

He may be right.

> > But yes, he's a bit eccentric ("we don't need the GPL anymore", uh what?)
I knew him before he was famous. Eccentric is a good description.

> > Emacs using Lisp made sense at the time. Lisp was designed for string
> > processing, which is essentially what an editor does, and the versions
> > of Lisp on a couple of early Emacs targets were much better suited for
> > the task than writing Emacs in something else would have been.
>
> Well, Richard Stallman basically invented Emacs, and he worked at MIT in
> the AI Lab using Lisp. That's probably the only real reason for using it.
The original Emacs (Editing MACroS) was a set of macros in the TECO language that ran on MIT's ITS system. TECO is an early "write only" language, with a syntax that looks a lot like line noise. One favorite game of old-time hackers was to figure out what your name would do as TECO code.

I believe James Gosling (creator of Java) wrote the first C implementation of Emacs. But as mentioned, Lisp already existed for an assortment of machines and was well suited for the sort of things an editor did, so writing Emacs in it made sense.

> > Eric also mentioned liking Lua. There's an interesting open source
> > editor called TextAdept which is a small kernel in C and a lot of Lua
> > code. The author calls it "infinitely extensible". I'll have to drop
> > Eric a note to see if he knows of it. He might just decide to make it
> > look like Emacs... :-P
>
> The ones that are extensible (i.e. not "ersatz") have all kinds of
> extension languages: Mocklisp, S-Lang, eLisp, and who knows what else!
Java, Python, Tcl, Rexx...

> Sure Lua and Python are hot right now, but I'm not sure how good an idea
> it would be to use them. (In particular, I assume Python 3000 would be
> preferred, but that's not stable yet, is it?)
I don't believe so, and there's a fair bit of argument in the Python community over it.

How good an idea it is depends on what you think the downside is.

Lua looks interesting. I have a version on my Palm OS PDA.

> > But meanwhile, I wouldn't try to use Gnu Emacs under DOS. It's just way
> > more than I would ever require.
>
> I don't want to say it's overkill, but yeah, it does a lot! I like it,
> it's cool. Doesn't mean I can't also use others, though. ;-)
"Why do you use Emacs under DOS?"

"Because I can!" :-D

> > I used to use Daniel Lawrence's MicroEMACS under DOS a good deal, and
> > wrote or rewrote an assortment of macros for it. It built "out of the
> > box" on my AT&T 3B1 under SysV R2, and it was nice to have the same
> > editor on multiple platforms.
>
> I think JASSPA is the best MicroEmacs variant, personally, unless you
I have that here, and tend to agree.

> count things like VILE (which also has a good DOS port). My main favorite
> is TDE (BTW, URL change!), which is
> pretty small (160k via gcc -Os & upx --ultra-brute), but I'm open to
> trying others too. ;-)
I have TDE, and have been in touch with Jason Hood on occcasion. I also use a few of his utilities under WinXP, like Ansicon, so I can use my preferred DOS prompt: PROMPT=$e[s$e[H$e[7;44m$e[K$D $B $P$e[m$e[u$g

I also like Blair Thompson's X2, which uses REXX as the macro language.

One of my favorite MS-DOS editors was Dr. David Nye's e.com. E was written in TASM. It edited files up to the limit of memory, had word wrap, search and replace, block move/copy/delete, and settable right and left margins, and did it all in 5KB. It also had programmable F-Keys: you could attach BAT files to F-Keys. Press the F-key, and E wrote the file being edited to a temp file on disk, and ran the BAT file attached to the F-key on it, then reloaded the modified temp file. You could create filters in batch files to perform text processing and call them from E. The big limit was that lines were limited to 80 characters because of how text was stored in memory, and longer lines would be silently truncated.
______
Dennis

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