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

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 07.04.2009, 00:00

> > 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.
It was lower requirements back in Puppy 2.16 or so (which ironically wasn't that long ago). Same for DeLi 0.7.2. But once you add certain features (UTF-8 support in DeLi), you lose some of that small footprint.

> 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.
Minix is pretty good and small too (hint hint: DOSMinix, heh, boots from on top of DOS).

> 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.
Ugh. C++ Builder is 390 MB though!! Ridiculous. I recently crammed a workable DJGPP compiler (compressed) onto a single floppy. ;-)

> > 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.
Okay, I think I was vaguely remembering (although not trying) Jedit and Diakonos, respectively. I think I got turned off by lack of DOS portability (although Ruby 1.8.4 exists, but I was too skeptical to bother trying).

> > > "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.

But for the DOS port, I only know of Eli Z. (the DJGPP port maintainer) ever actually using that, and only then on Win9x, IIRC.

> 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.
Yes, esp. because it was so slow to start up anyways. ;-)
But yeah, compile, edit, debug, jump to errors, play games, shell crud, etc. It's an all-in-one suite.

> > Note that [Jason Hood] 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.
Yes, but they don't have the latest stuff.

> > 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.
Updated again on the 3rd, something about "XCOPY now works" (whatever that means).

> > 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.
Oh, I've long ago downloaded BRexx and Regina, just never learned yet. :-D

> > > 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
DTE (ancestor of TDE and FTE) had such a limit. I don't doubt you can whip some bastardly > 64k files into shape. (In fact, my text editor comparison comments are all inside a bat called V49SPLIT.BAT, intended to split a 160k .ASM into < 64k pieces "just in case", heh.)

> > 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.)
I've tried it. IIRC, it has a search/replace bug. And no regex. But yeah, it's pretty good, esp. for its size!

P.S. I was recently wondering to myself, "Since GNU Emacs takes so much space anyways, and since Freemacs IS GPL, why don't they include that in the distribution? It wouldn't hurt, and would be a nice alternative for old old machines." (Quick guess: they would be enraged at the idea of 16-bit, and/or mad that it uses TASM, doh. Still, the Changelogs take up more space!! And it IS extensible! Oh well, just a daydream I guess.)

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