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

posted by Dennis, 06.04.2009, 01:25

> > It came fromFujitsu 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 dwon.
I'd expect it. XP might be bearable if you had a fast HD for swapping, but not otherwise. The Lifbook does not have a fast HD.

> > 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.

It's intended for lower end hardware. There are reports in the Puppy forums of Puppy running successfully (for suitable values of success...) on P200s with 48MB of RAM.

Even Linus sometimes seems bloated. I have an AT&T 3B1 (enhanced model of their old UNIX-PC. It uses a 10mhz MC68010 CPU, and will boot and run a port of AT&T Unix System V Release 2 in one megabyte of RAM and perform acceptably. Give it more (I have 3.5MB). and it flies.

> Obviously FF3 and Eclipse are bloat hogs, but you
> don't need to start them up too often (just keep 'em open).

That's pretty much what I do.

> Heh, you think GNU Emacs is bloated, I think Eclipse (Java-based?) is worse.
Yes, written in Java. The nice thing is that it's cross-platform. If you have a current JVM, it will run. It's effectively the same under Windows and Linux.

Eclipse seems to have largely killed the market for commercial programmers IDEs. Microsoft Visual Studio still gets used, because it's Microsoft. Codegear (the former Borland tools operation) still sells and supports C++ Builder and J Builder, but seems to be mostly catering to an established market.

The thing is, hardware is fast and cheap enough that increasingly fewer people care about bloat. It's faster and cheaper to throw more hardware at it than to optimize for size, unless you are doing embedded development.

> > 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.

I'd be slightly surprised if it did.

> 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.)
I don't know enough about OS/2 to comment. (I used to have an OS/2 server in my computer room, but it was effectively an appliance running a third-party telephony system, and all I had to do was bring it up and down.)

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

> Yeah, I've heard of TECO but never gotten bored enough to actually try it.
> ;-)
If you feel like poking around, you can get it for DOS, Windoze, OS/2, Linux, and Mac OS/X here: http://almy.us/teco.html

> > 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.
That's for the Gnu and Xemacs versions. Gosmacs implemented "Mocklisp", and became the basis for a commercial version by CCA. There used to be an outfit called Convex Systems that made baby supercomputers. They reported being able to close every open bug filed against CCA Emacs by substituting Gnu 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...
>
> 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 Java one that was pretty powerful sounding. There
> was even one written in Ruby, IIRC.
Four that I know of. Hop over to TextEditors, and look that the JavaBasedEditors, PythonEditorFamily, RubyEditorFamily, and TclTkEditorFamily for editors written entirely in a script language.

> > > 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.
There is at least one, though not of Python 3. There's even a partial port of Python to Palm OS called Pippy.

> > 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 are editors, but still ....)
Lots of things use Lua internally. It's meant to be embedded.

> > "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 it has over almost all others is much much
> better online help (Info and Man readers, describe-key, describe-function,
> describe-variable, apropos).
More than that, really. There are email reader and news reader modes for emacs among other things. The usual practice among old time emacs hackers was to invoke emacs when they logged in, and use emacs as their shell. They could do everything they needed to do from within emacs.

> > 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
Thanks for the update. The older URLs still work, however.

> updated ANSICON to work even with DEP turned on (NX bit or whatever).
Cool. I don't run Vista, so I don't think I need that update, but nice to see it in any case.

> > 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).
There's one called BRexx. Quercus Systems used to have a shareware version called Personal REXX, but they seem to be gone as well.

> > 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!).
I kinda like Freemacs. And you can make a case that if the file you are editing is bigger than 64KB, you are doing soomething wrong... :-P

> > 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).
And would have been fun to implement in TASM. Most folks don't need it, so I never saw it as a lack. In any case, the author was an MD, hacking for fun, not a professional developer. He may not have been aware of regexes.

> > 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.
I used to be involved in BBSes, back in the days when you called a BBS with a dial up modem. I used to moderate ten message areas for one of the big BBS networks (RIME), and made heavy use of an offline reader. With teh reader, you called the BBS, opened a mail door, and downloaded a packet of messages posted since your last call. You could read and reply offline, then call the BBS, post your replies, and download the new message packet.

E was a perfect replies editor. I kept it and various other things like LIST on a RAMdisk for instant invocation. I kept it stashed on my floppies as well, but had to remember the 80 col limit.

Another neat tiny editor is Brian KElley's TM, a "Tiny eMacs" editor in 4K.
See http://www.bhk.com/tm/

(It does have the 64K limit.)
______
Dennis

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