: From: Barzilay Eliyahu <CS.bgu.ac.il at eli>
: Date: Wed, 2 Apr 1997 23:46:46 +0300
: 
: I had a lot of miserable time with WinEmacs some time ago.  The point is
: that there is nothing much that WinEmacs cannot do and GNU Emacs can - but
: many Lisp users are research people that almost always work in a Unix
: environment as well - and have their own (possibly large & complex) GNU
: Emacs configurations.  This is the situation I had to live with - having
: my 'official' files on Unix, and some quick hack for the WinEmacs with many
: bugs that I didn't have time to work on.

No doubt it is a pain to try to keep one's Emacs init file compatible 
between FSF Emacs and XEmacs or Win-Emacs. However, porting one's Emacs 
init file is usually a one-shot effort, and if you're sophisticated
enough to have written a large init file, most likely you're sophisticated
enough to quickly perform such a port. There are some packages evolving 
for maintaining compatibility between the various dialects, but they're 
not yet ready for prime time. Better solutions for inter-dialect 
compatibility should eventually emerge. Of course once Editi runs on
all Emacsen the point will be moot.

Editi works 'out of the box' with ACL/Win. Simple Emacs init file
customizations (such as remapping key bindings) are also highly
portable between Emacsen and thus most simple Emacs init files should
easily port from FSF to Win-Emacs (if not work 'out of the box').

Both Pearl and Win-Emacs users are very helpful -- feel free to ask 
for help on the <pearlsoft.com at {tech,win-emacs}> mailing lists.

: Another point is the process communication using files that tends to be
: highly unreliable - this is probably not something that will be better with
: GNU, but the DDE interface should be better - and it works only on the new
: WinEmacs version - and you don't get that from Allegro if you buy the site-
: license version.
: This makes the last point - GNU Emacs is free, so you get updates, bug fixes
: etc. with convenience - that is the main disadvantage of using WinEmacs.

Editi (version 1.3 and higher) by default uses DDE for IPC, and this is
highly reliable (but even the temporary-file based IPC scheme should be
reasonably reliable, though somewhat slower than DDE). If you encounter
any problems then please report them to <pearlsoft.com. at tech>

DDE indeed had bugs in earlier versions of Win-Emacs, but these have long
been fixed in the latest version 1.5. All Editi users should be using
version 1.5 of Win-Emacs. If I recall correctly, there was a special deal
between Pearl and Franz that allowed Franz ACL Prof. customers to
upgrade to Win-Emacs 1.5 for free (or little cost). You should contact
Franz to upgrade if you are using an earlier version. It is in the
best interest of both Pearl and Franz to ensure all customers are no
longer using the old buggy Win-Emacs (note that anyone can download
the free Win-Emacs 1.5 'demo' from http://www.pearlsoft.com -- this
is exactly the same as the for-cost version except that a nag screen
pops up every half-hour).

Both Win-Emacs and Editi have come a long way from the early clunky
versions, so if you gave up on one of the earlier versions you should
most definitely reconsider Win-Emacs 1.5 + Editi 3.0. The combination
of the two already includes most of the functionality that I was
accustomed to on (Symbolics) Lisp Machines, and will greatly surpass
such once Editi 4.0 is released.

I also encourage all users to provide feedback on Editi in this
forum. If there is some particular feature that you find missing
in Editi, or some enhancement you desire, etc, please let me know. 
As many heavy Editi users will attest (Don Mitchell, Dave Tenny...), 
I'm quite happy to incorporate user suggestions into Editi.

-Bill Dubuque