Date: Fri, 5 Feb 93 09:03:26 CST
From: bobp AT hal DOT com (Bob Pendleton)
To: iis!arnstein AT Sun DOT COM
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Programmers' editor


>What text editor you you prefer for software development?  I'm looking for the
>best editor that
>     1.  Costs nothing,
>     2.  Runs under MS-DOS (MS Windows 3.1 would be nice),
>     3.  Is robust and dependable.

During the day on a UNIX workstation I use GNU emacs. So, at night on
my MS-DOS based system I use a version of mg.

Mg is a small clone of GNU emacs. It's missing a few things including
an extension language. But, the code is highly portable, reasonably
configurable, and mostly public domain.

Mg2a is available on most large ftp sites. There is a set of patches
to bring it up to version Mg2b. And, I've been hacking on it for a
while (to make it more like emacs and to fix the few bugs I've found)
and I call that version mg2c.

While mg doesn't support subprocesses you can shell out to ms-dos and
then exit back to mg.

It seems to be robust and dependable. At least I haven't had any
problems with it.

I have used demacs. It was very slow on my machine (40 Mhz 386 with
8meg). Slow enough to be unusable by me.

There are also several versions of MicroEmacs available on the net.
MicroEmacs is a pretty good editor. I used it for several years, but
it is different enough from GNU emacs to cause some problems switching
back and forth.

There is also a version of MicroEmacs that has been ported to Windows.
I played with it one evening. It wasn't too bad. But Windows and all
Windows apps are so slow that I find them to be unusable for most
things.

				Bob P.