The Story of XEmacs (2019)(nickdrozd.github.io)
nickdrozd.github.io
The Story of XEmacs (2019)
https://nickdrozd.github.io/2019/02/19/xemacs.html
8 comments
Did it have one X11 window per document, or just one for all documents?
Emacsen generally do both. They call it "frame" and "window". How you use that it's up to you (and the packages you're using).
To add more detail: You can split a window into multiple subwindows, and each subwindow can show any file. If you want, you can watch different parts of the same file in different subwindows (each subwindow can be scrolled independently). This is something that emacs does better and more flexibly than many supposedly advanced editors and IDEs.
For historical reasons emacs uses its own terminology: a window is called a "frame", and what I called subwindow above is called a "window". Instead of a file, in emacs you talk about "buffers", although a buffer is not exactly the same thing as a file, since you can (and do) have buffers that are interfaces to other emacs functionality, not linked to any particular file.
For historical reasons emacs uses its own terminology: a window is called a "frame", and what I called subwindow above is called a "window". Instead of a file, in emacs you talk about "buffers", although a buffer is not exactly the same thing as a file, since you can (and do) have buffers that are interfaces to other emacs functionality, not linked to any particular file.
It came with batteries too. You had to manually install more packages into GNU Emacs to get what xemacs had already.
Nice blast from the past -- I used xemacs from around 2000-2005, including for reading email and IRC, because that was a thing people used to do. I had a setup where I used it graphically at the machine, but could also ssh in and attach to the same process on the terminal, which I think was why I wanted xemacs rather than GNU emacs.
Exactly thanks to those features, I felt at home in UNIX without the niceties of Borland IDEs.
Now 25 years later, there is enough to choose from regarding IDEs and UNIX based systems.
Now 25 years later, there is enough to choose from regarding IDEs and UNIX based systems.
Lucid Emacs .. I hadn't heard that name in decades. Back in the day, in the sunny 1990s, it was XEmacs that I mostly used.
I think it also had package management at a time when the GNU Emacs side thought that was decadent.
In the end it was a bit like the gcc/egcs situation: GNU learned something from the schism and started to take users' wishes seriously, and shortly thereafter there was no reason to continue separate lines of development.