Been playing a bit, installed editors/ uemacs, qemacs, em, mg, jove, and emacs.
uemacs is a simple MicroEMACS 4.0 set up, looks good for learning. I.e. a Pico/Nano style shortcut buffer on top.
qemacs wouldn’t start, so much for quick emacs
em is a modified MicroEMACS 3.x/4.0 with an ID of uEmacs/PK-TOY 4.0.17
jove is Johnatons Own Version of Emacs, looks like my favorite so far. It asks “Some buffers haven’t been saved; leave anyway? ” rather then a save y/n, modified buffers exist still leave yes or no and please say exactly yes or no blah blah like GNU Emacs. em & uemacs share joves trate here as well but mg takes after emacs proper. Only mg won’t ask before exit if its the stratch buffer.
emacs, well is GNU Emacs. Slow loading bukly bastard with a 4.5MB binary !! Compare to the others which are smaller then nvi/nex but bigger then ed. I suppose the fact that its the only emacsen in this list that has X11/GUI support warrents its bulk… maybe
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/emacs 8:04
4.5M /usr/local/bin/emacs
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/jove 8:05
148K /usr/local/bin/jove
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/bin/nex 8:05
304K /usr/bin/nex
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/bin/vi 8:05
304K /usr/bin/vi
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/uemacs 8:06
124K /usr/local/bin/uemacs
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/em 8:06
84K /usr/local/bin/em
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/mg 8:06
98K /usr/local/bin/mg
Terry@Dixie$ du -ch /usr/local/bin/vim 8:06
1.4M /usr/local/bin/vim
As you can see, em is the smallest and emacs the fatest. So far, I think I like Jove but they all seem to lack GNU/X Emacs self-documentational nature. Personally I prefer nVi or Vim, but Jove is pretty nice. All of these emacsen do support multiple editing buffers, which is one thing I did like ’bout emacs back when I used to use XEmacs as my primary editor.
mg is a variant of MicroEMACS maintained by the OpenBSD people, nice little editor. I’ve never used OpenBSD and have little expirence with NetBSD so I don’t know if they have an easyeditor like FreeBSD’s ee but I’d reckon mg could serve the same purpose. I generally use ‘vi’ on systems lacking vim though, so I dunno. So far in my travels the only editor I can’t use well, has got to be ed and emacs. Why? Because ed’s ‘?’ error message annoys me and GNU Emacs just pisses me off by its very nature.I can use Emacs pretty well, I just choose not to (again I prever Vi)