🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7704@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de> steiner@informatik.uni-kl.de (Donald Steiner) writes:

   .............
   perusing the various newsgroups it seems like there are three dominant
   ones: Freemacs & MG, both PD, and Epsilon's commercial product.  Not
   having any further info, I wonder if anybody would be able to spare
   some time to answer the following questions:

   1. Which do you prefer and why?
   2. Which is most customizable?
   3. Which would run best on a low powered laptop? 


I have used Freemacs & MG on a poqet PC - this has to be one of the
more "low powered pc's. The one I have has 512K of RAM and a MD/CGA
compatible display.


Freemacs is much more customizable and has many more features. If you
have hard disk storage or ram disk of a megabyte, say, all the
extension files, and documentation can be loaded as you require.
Freemacs has file name completion, a crude dired, and many extensions
that are similar to GNU emacs. With the mint extension language, I
found that I could cobble most of the simpler extensions I have added
to my emacs setup on other machines. However, on a 8088 running at
about 7mHz, I found Freemacs a bit too sluggish for my habits. The
character buffering and keyboard response consistly confused me. Mind
you this is more a characteristic of my hardware - the freemacs
software is very nice indeed.

MG allows almost no customization beyond keybinding - this is by
design. MG is implemented to be small in size on many platforms.  I
find keyboard and display response to be a bit better on my slow
machine. I greatly miss filename completion but most other simple
emacs operations are provided.  I use this program most days.

You might also be concerned about program size. MG consumes about 100K
on my disk. For some reason my poqet won't put up with PKlite
compression for MG but MG will compress to about 60K with PKlite.  The
minimum space required for Freemacs is closer to 200K and you can
easily consume 400K with extensions and help. Most of the Freemacs
distribution can be compressed only if you use something like a squish
device-driver for on the fly compression.

Both Freemacs & MG are very nice programs. 
My opinion is that MG runs better on low powered laptop.


The is also another emacs that I am going to try soon :
 	MicroEMACS version 3.11 is ready for BETA testing. It is
available via anonymous FTP from midas.mgmt.purdue.edu (which is also
called zeus.mgmt.purdue.edu) in the dist/uemacs311BETA directory
outside the hours of 8am to 5pm on EST on weekdays.


Bob Wilhelm

Knowledge-based Engineering       and currently visiting at
Systems Research Laboratory       
Dept. of Mechanical               Rockwell International Science Center
& Industrial Engineering          Palo Alto Laboratory
University of Illinois            444 High Street
at Urbana-Champaign               Palo Alto, CA 94301
                                  
                                  wilhelm@rpal.rockwell.com 
                                  (415)325-0253