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

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 05.04.2009, 23:47
(edited by Rugxulo on 06.04.2009, 00:29)

> 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
Yeah, my Dad has an older XP machine with only 256 MB, and it really did start to bog down. Of course, he had too many startup processes (iTunes, Acrobat, etc). Sometimes I wonder if XP is too slow due to bad optimizations from MS' compiler. At least, it always felt like it should be faster. And yet they claim that it runs faster than Vista on the same machine. Maybe it's just me with the stupid antivirus / anti-spyware etc. running in the background a lot. (But I use this Vista laptop more these days anyways ... even if I can't build GNU Emacs/DJGPP on it, doh.)

> 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.
I've seen my brother run Puppy on one of his (slightly old) recycled PCs, and it ran pretty well. Obviously FF3 and Eclipse are bloat hogs, but you don't need to start them up too often (just keep 'em open). Heh, you think GNU Emacs is bloated, I think Eclipse (Java-based?) is worse.

> I have Jed and notGnu. If you want it, I may know where to find Emacs for
> OS/2.
I found (and tested) 19.33, but it officially wasn't tested for DOS, so it didn't actually work in that way. And for good or bad, the typical modern Emacs for OS/2 isn't EMX, only OS/2 only. (Even VILE for OS/2 via EMX is OS/2 only. Kinda almost defeats the point, IMHO.)

> > > 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.
Well, all the bigwigs in the software world are considered a little crazy, rightly or wrongly. It takes a special breed, so to speak.

> 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.
Yeah, I've heard of TECO but never gotten bored enough to actually try it. ;-)

> I believe James Gosling (creator of Java) wrote the first C implementation
> of Emacs.

Officially, the C part is only for portability and speed of the main core.

> 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.
Even VILE I think supports Perl and maybe Python (and who knows what else).

> > 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...
Ah yes, I forgot about Rexx. Earlier I was thinking, "I've never seen one", but that's because I never tried THE (or ever used OS/2 natively).

I forget the name of that (non-Emacs) Java editor that was pretty powerful sounding. There was even another editor written in Ruby, IIRC.

> > 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.
There is actually a (supposedly) good DOS port of Python, but I've never tested 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.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and Doom: The Roguelike both use Lua internally. (I know those aren't editors, but still ....)

> "Why do you use Emacs under DOS?"
>
> "Because I can!" :-D
It really is very customizable (even beyond the "obviously because it's open source" deal). I'm checking a (slightly older) copy of my notes, but the only really obvious thing (besides that) it has over almost all others is much much better online help (Info and Man readers, describe-key, describe-function, describe-variable, apropos).

You could also say its portability and various key emulations (Brief, CUA, vi) help too, but it's not really alone in that. Probably (depending on OS) Tramp, ERC, Gnus, Calc, Eshell, Diary, Calendar, flyspell, auto-compression, Org mode, Ediff, etc. help a lot too. Oh, and multiple frames (not buffers or windows although those also work), even in DOS. And editing various encodings (even UTF-8) without needing special fonts, is nice.

> > 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

Note that he moved web providers recently ("ran out of room" on Geocities, surprised he lasted that long! 15 MB ftw!! What is this, 1996???) and also updated ANSICON to work even with DEP turned on (NX bit or whatever), so finally it works on Vista.

> I also like Blair Thompson's X2, which uses REXX as the macro language.
I never learned REXX, so I can't say. But the investigating I've done makes it look very interesting, at least. And yes, I know, there are at least two DOS ports (Regina and something else, I forget).

> 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,

Yes, I know. No more stinkin' 64k limit (sorry FD Edit and Freemacs!).

> had word
> wrap, search and replace, block move/copy/delete, and settable right
> and left margins, and did it all in 5KB.

6k, IIRC. And the search and replace was fairly basic, no regex (obviously no surprise but would've been nice).

> 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.
Yes, 80 lines max., always truncated, tabs always expanded, .BAK always created, and even that .BAK was overwritten later if you made even the slightest change, which almost defeats the point, IMO. If I wasn't so lazy, I would've translated it from TASM to FASM, but then again, I don't really use it. Still, if you ignore all that, it's a fairly good editor (if you don't need hard tabs, e.g. makefiles, and don't mind 80 columns max). At one time I used it on all my floppies, but then I migrated to Ezedit.

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