🚀 go-pugleaf

Originally it was written:
>       Does anyone have experience with both Freemacs and MicroEMACS
>       and have an *objective* opinion of the two? Or, is there another
>       shareware EMACS for MS-DOS boxes that is superior to the two that I
>       have mentioned?
>

Apparently not.  See below.  (Other folks are quoted using %, names
omitted to avoid getting personal about this sort of thing :-)

<person A>
%  Basically, it's like this: Choose Freemacs if you want the best GNU
%  Emacs emulation and don't need to edit files >64K.  Choose
%  MicroEMACS if you want to be able to run the exact same program on
%  both DOS and Unix.

<person B>
%  Well, maybe.  But on my cheap XT clone Freemacs keeps hanging, so I
%  sick with the horrid Micro Emacs (well, not realy, now I have Vpix
%  (dos under Unix) so I'm going to use Gnu Emacs, just whip up
%  something to insert & remove those stupid CR's when I load'n'save).

I think that it is terribly unfair to describe MicroEMACS as "horrid."

  In these modern days, many folks think that GNU EMACS is the only
definition of the editor.  I beg to differ.  While I use GNU EMACS all
the time on the Sparcs hereabouts, the "emacs" I first learned was a
set of "editing macros" that worked with TECO on a PDP-11 and lisp
was nowhere to be found.

  In the mean time there have been many different native implementations
of EMACS using different approaches and having different features.
FREEMACS is apparently fairly similar to GNU EMACS, with the limitation
of 64K.  MicroEMACS is a good solid EMACS that runs on lots of machines
and doesn't have the 64K limit, but doesn't try to emulate the GNU dialect
and the lisp extension language.  MicroEMACS does have a good extension
language and lots of folks are happy with it.  A third widely used MSDOS
alternative is JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of EMACS), which isn't as
extensible but is fast and small and handles more than 64K.

  The facts are that one's preference in EMACS implementations is a
religious issue for most folks.  The thing to do is to go grab any
or all of these from archive sites on the net and try them out.  Use
the one that you like best or another if you prefer it.  The IEEE POSIX.2
standards group looked into whether the EMACS editor should be included
in the standard the way that the vi editor was included.  The overwhelming
response from the EMACS community was that it should NOT be standardised.
Part of this was because there were and are so many variants that one
couldn't find a very large common ground out there.