UNIXpc Gnu Emacs update (LONG)

[Brant Cheikes]

In article <4891 at ihlpf.ATT.COM> gmark at ihlpf.ATT.COM (Stewart) writes:
>I've seen several postings requesting the whereabouts of
>"Gnu" Emacs.  Was just wondering if there was something special
>about "Gnu" Emacs, or they just wanted some version of Emacs to
>run on the UNIX-PC?  [...]  Better than
>Gmacs (Gosling's Emacs)?

Gnu Emacs (GE) has a unique referent, rather than being some random
version of Emacs.  It is one of several free software products
distributed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) (which I will not
even BEGIN to describe).  GE is part of the Gnu project (GNU stands
(recursively) for GNU's Not Unix), a project to develop a Unix-like
(more or less) operating system that will run on a wide variety of
machines and have freely distributed source code.  Other Gnu Project
products include GCC (the Gnu C Compiler), Gnu Bison (YACC
replacement), Gnu Awk, GDB (symbolic debugger), Gnu Make, etc.  Many
of these run only on Vaxes and Suns at the moment (e.g., GDB, GCC++,
Gnu ld).  GE is mostly written and maintained by Richard M. Stallman
(RMS), who also founded the FSF.  RMS developed the Emacs concept
while a student in the MIT AI Lab (I can look up the tech report ref
if anyone is interested) and all Emacses trace their roots back to his
original PDP-10 ITS Emacs.

I haven't used Gosmacs for a long time, but many around Penn believe
GE to be a strictly superior display editor (for whatever that's
worth).  There's a long file distributed with GE called GOSDIFFS that
details the differences between GE and Gosmacs, too long to post, but
I'd e-mail it on request.  The main points about GE is that it's
EASILY customizable using Emacs Lisp, all the source code (in C and
Emacs Lisp) is available, it's very well documented, and it provides a
large array of tools making it possible to do many things without
having to jump to a shell (like reading mail, news, compiling programs
you're editing).  But editor preference is essentially a religious
issue, so I'll let it go at that, hoping to avoid starting an editor
flame war.

GE does run on UNIXpc's, and I've found its performance to be as good
as or better than that on my research VAX 785.  The latest complete GE
distribution is available for anonymous ARPAnet FTP from site
prep.ai.mit.edu, in the file /u2/emacs/edist.tar.Z (about 4Mb in
size).  Anonymous UUCP access to the distribution is provided by
osu-cis, but I'm not sure of the details; write to Bob Sutterfield
(sutterfield at cis.ohio-state.edu, I think, or maybe bob at ...) for
details.  For those who cannot go either route, I will put a slightly
stripped-down version of the distribution on UNIXpc floppies by
request, including compiled executables for those unfortunates without
development kits.  For those who can get the distribution elsewhere, I
will e-mail on request the patches to enable GE support of the UNIXpc
mouse, the UNIXpc keypad definitions, and the changes to m-7300.h for
building a magic 0413 emacs executable.

Sorry to run on so long folks, but I thought I might as well answer a
whole bunch of questions all at once.
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Computer and Information Science
ARPA: brant at linc.cis.upenn.edu, UUCP: ...drexel!manta!brant