: Date: Wed, 02 Apr 1997 16:22:23 -0600
: From: Dale Arntson <uchicago.edu at d-arntson>
:
: The stability problem I was experiencing may be a red herring. Win-Emacs
: was very unstable after I upgraded to 4.0, but I just reinstalled it and
: so far it is working fine.
You need to re-dump Win-Emacs after an OS upgrade. Failing to do
such may have been the source of your stability problems. Also be sure
to (setq lock-directory nil) in your emacs.ini to avoid crashes due
to files left in the ./lock directory after an abnormal Emacs exit.
: With regard to the larger issue of the desirability of porting Editi to
: Gnu Emacs, I can only say that there seems to be a lot of activity
: around the Gnu Win-32 project and the Win-32 port of Gnu Emacs, whereas
: there is no evidence of any at Pearlsoft.
There was also a lot of activity when Win-Emacs was first ported.
Win-Emacs has a three year head start on ntemacs, and has much
better native support in many areas (e.g. DDE, drag 'n drop ...).
Not to mention that many XEmacs users would rather fight than switch
to FSF Emacs (for good reasons). It is no coincidence that most of
the major Emacs package developers prefer XEmacs.
: Win-emacs is at least 10 releases behind Xemacs, and Pearlsoft's Website
: has not been updated in more than a year. However, the Win-32 port of
: Gnu Emacs is at the current revision, and several people are working on
: porting packages and utilities for Win-32 Gnu Emacs. See the faq at:
:
: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs.html
:
: I am not aware of any similar effort to port current Xemacs packages to
: Win-32. Am I out of touch on this point? Voelker did a nice job of
: porting Gnu Emacs. I would like to be able to use it as my development
: environment.
Most all software that is ported to Win32 will also work with
Win-Emacs (possibly with small modifications).
There are a number of different efforts underway to port the latest
version of XEmacs to Windows (both free and commercial). It is only
a matter of time before one of them comes to fruition.
However, all of these issues are irrelevant if one is simply
interested in using Win-Emacs + Editi as a Lisp IDE between
ACL and Emacs. As such, it already works out of the box, and
is highly integrated with ACL.
It is only when you start wandering into the Emacs kitchen
sink that you begin encountering portability problems (e.g.
if you're using Emacs as a mail/news reader, ftp client, etc).
These issues are certainly relevant, but are somewhat orthogonal
to the use of Emacs as a Lisp IDE.
Emacs life should be much easier in a few months or so -- once all
of the major Emacs packages are fully ported to Win32.
-Bill Dubuque