[Boulder.pm] text editor wars

[rise]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Walter Pienciak wrote:

> Well, as the saying goes, "There is only one emacs, and its name is
> emacs."  No, wait a minute, there are several emacses.

<ObReligiousBigotry>That's Emacsen I believe.</ObReligiousBigotry>

> I moved away from emacs years ago, and have no real familiarity with
> the schism within the realm.
>
> Opinions on the best emacs that money can['t] buy, so I can install
> it for my l'il darling?

I'm very happy with GNU Emacs, I tried both a while back and found I
preferred the GNU version mainly for taste reasons.  The old reasons
to choose XEmacs were mainly the X support and more recently font
locking (== syntax highlighting) in text terminals and both have
fallen by the wayside.  As far as features they're close to identical
as of GNU Emacs 21 and most packages run fine under either version.
There are a lot of out of date comparisons of recent versions of
XEmacs to old versions of GNU Emacs that talk about various X features
that are now common to both.  My impression is that GNU Emacs
development is now slightly more active than XEmacs (especially in
internationalization), but either will do the job just fine.

As far as books go there are more that cover GNU Emacs, but that gap
is closing as well.

Disclaimer: I actually like running the CVS HEAD version of GNU Emacs,
so I'm clearly mildly deranged on this topic.

-- 
Jonathan Conway