🚀 go-pugleaf

Bjorn Victor wrote:
> And, to lead into the other subject, it's a real nice hacking machine.
> I can spend hours fixing a subtle bug, or re-implementing a nice
> feature from somewhere else, and it's FUN!  On the other hand, it's
> fun hacking Emacs lisp too (e.g. re-implementing Zmacs features), and
> on the third hand, I really should do something completely different
> -- my research.

But Zmacs is so much better than GNU Emacs in so many ways... even down to
the datastructures!  GNUmacs is character-oriented rather than line-oriented,
which makes a lot of things next to impossible to do.  Lines don't have
plists; you can't elide arbitrary sections of text the way VisiDoc does;
the first insert after a move in any file larger than ten megs takes up to
half a minute (because GNUmacs has to move the one and only one "insertion
hole").  Minor modes in GNUmacs are almost impossible to implement correctly.
I think TAGS tables suck.  Both conceptually and in the current implementation.
I could go on and on...

Also all of the GNU Emacs mail readers are substantially more lame.

Hans Chalupsky:
>- development environments (such as various fancy lisp-modes for GNU emacs)
>  are (in my opinion) better then the TI-Explorer environment (there are still
>  a few things missing such as window based debuggers and inspectors, but you
>  can get approximations of those in the Allegro composer or Sun's SPE)

Pale imitations at best, and really slow from what I've seen...  The
Lispms have the state-of-the-art in development environments, even though
they're going the way of the dinosaurs.  But we'll fix that soon :-)

Bjorn:
> I think Emacs will eventually have most of Zmacs' "graphic" features (e.g.
> multiple fonts), but some of the other bugs are very hard to get out.  And it
> will always live with 8-bit characters, which is a loss from the 12-bit LISPM
> characters.  You can't both have "clean" ISO 8859-1 and a Meta key, for
> instance.

I'm not convinced: just because you can't have 12-bit characters in a file 
doesn't mean you can't have 12-bit input.  If input was event-based instead of
character based, then under X you could easily have seperate keybindings for
left-shift-cokebottle and right-shift-cokebottle...

Do any of you have Explorers at home?  I've often considered buying a used one
to play with, but I'm a bit concerned about power/temperature requirements, 
and availability of spare parts.  Anyone have any comments?

		-- Jamie, considering getting CDRNEXT on my license plate.