Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Kastrup]

David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> writes:

> me@privacy.net writes:
>
>> Now is this plain eMacs?
>>
>> Isn't there something called Xemacs as well?
>
> "Same thing, but different."  If memory serves, XEmacs started life
> as a branch from "normal" ("FSF" or "GNU") Emacs over frustration on
> getting one of the older releases out.  It's historically had a
> little better support for inlined images, proportional fonts, and
> the like,

Uh, "better support"?  It supported them, and Emacs didn't.

> at the cost of supporting those features differently from "normal"
> Emacs when it's added them in as well.

Part of the reason is that the XEmacs way for such features usually is
incomprehensible.

> XEmacs's other advantage is that it comes with an add-on bundle of
> approximately every elisp package out there; "normal" Emacs is much
> more conservative about what can be included (due to
> likely-justified license paranoia: while people complain about the
> Linux kernel being of dubious heritage, all code distributed with
> Emacs has had copyright assigned to the FSF).

No.  For example MULE is not copyrighted by the FSF, but licensed from
the copyright holder.  But most parts of Emacs are (c) FSF.

The main problem I find with XEmacs is that it is a travelling junk
yard which does not deliver on its promises.  It has pretty lousy
utf-8 (Emacs has been the loss leader with MULE, contrary to the
general trend in featuritis, but in contrast to the trends I imagine
perceiving with XEmacs, development did not cease after initial
success, and so XEmacs stayed behind), image interfaces that almost
nobody uses because it is too hard to figure out how (and indeed,
binary images will get garbled on load once you have used dired for
the first time), a graphical interface and icons that look gross
compared to today's standards, and often incomprehensible
documentation.  XEmacs may be fun to developers, but since the shere
scope of Emacsen means that you can be developer of probably 10% of
the code base at most and are mere user for the rest, this gives it
limited audience.

> My current feel is that XEmacs doesn't offer a whole lot that's not
> in Emacs,

Multi-tty support is probably the only thing I can think of right now.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum