Hi,
I sometimes help friends at work trying out Emacs. We're mostly on Windows and one thing that makes things harder is that some of the useful features of Emacs uses external tools. I'm thinking specifically about small utilities like diff, grep, etc. So, on Windows, useful features like Ediff and the different grep-based tools do not work out of the box.
I see that we bundle some exe files in the bin directory of Emacs (bunzip2, bzcat, etc.), could we include some of the other core utilities as well?
Of course, if you commit to use Emacs you can make sure to install these tools in one of several ways it can be done today (Cygwin. MSYS, natively compiled, etc.) but users could be up and running much faster if they did not have to do this. If you are trying out Emacs and compare it with other editors today, where some of this are also built in but work without these external tools, you might give up.
Any comments and opinions on this? Does anything stop us from bundling a few more useful utilities to make Emacs even more useful by default? I think it should benefit many users.
Thanks!
/Mathias
PS. Of course, Emacs has support for many external tools, and one might ask: where do we stop? But, I think the core features, mentioned above, are good candidates to include by default.