Emacs

Had a nice nap, but a strange dream.

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The earliest thing I can remember, was a gathering of family. I remember we were getting into boats and were rowing out, my Grandfather was at the other end of my boat and said something about a everyone taking ‘swim’. I said I didn’t know how to swim, which is technically true. So plans were changed and the water was covered with this huge blue canvas and we all piled out of the boats and setup for the get together, or whatever we were doing there…

I laid back on the canvas and thought to myself. About how the last time I felt like this without having to worry about the swaying waves washing over me, was years and years ago to when I was about three years old; sloshing about in the huge pool in the back yard with a snorkel, fins, and an inflatable tube. Hmm, it’s probably been at least twelve years since I was last in a pool, let along those days lol.

Then it began to rain, so we draped green canvas covers over our ‘camp ground’ and went about business. Someone asked me to look something up, so I fired up my laptop battery power.As the weather got worse, the group split: some went in search of better shelter, a few stayed; I was assigned to stay put. Sometime later, I got thumped on the head, pulling off the canvas to take a look; I saw that I had been hit in the head by a failing tree branch, and the corner of the area was riddled with such debree.

So I decided it would be better to get out of here, even if it meant getting a bit wet lol. In the ensuring action, which in the real world would’ve resulted in a laptop yielding electro-shock therapy… The last of the group moved into the building like structure at the center of the area, as the rain got even worse. I helped with setting up the stetting up the ticker storm-guard on the point of entry.

Next my attention turned to food prep and emacs. Then Aunt Ruth and some others were trying to get in, so I removed the storm-thing from the point of entry to let them in, and then was set in search of emacs, xemacs, and another funky coloured pen labeled ‘3.5.1’ or was it ‘3.5.8’, or ‘3.8.1’, or ‘3.8.5’ or something like that; it was supposed to be a fork of XEmacs :

Why on earth would a Vi-lover dream of emacsen!?

That’s when I woke up in a cold sweat, looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool.

My laugh of the day, 2008-09-08

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“To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users running vi — or four running EMACS.”

I just couldn’t help but smile, nod, and laugh lol. Vi is a fairly light weight program in todays world, and was designed in a time when just moving your text editors cursor was probably slow as watching paint drying. Emacs on the other hand, tends to be rather hefty in most good implementations, I think it was once a cottage indrusty to make light-weight emacsen.

And to this day in the form of GNU and X Emacs is, one small operating system, but a huge text editor compared to the nimble Vi. I don’t go much in for the Vi Vs. Emacs stuff and vice versa, because I use the Vim which is the only thing better then Vi 😉

Emacs pinky

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Beware of attractive Blondes in tight cloths…. lol

On a lighter note, I’ve had emacs on the brain lately. Which is some one strange as I’m Vi man with a strong liking for VIM.

Generally GNU Emacs is the emacsen by which I compare emacsen. I first learned the basics of using emacs day to day using XEmacs on a Windows machine. Nice editor although i’ve never cared much for the Meta key. Generally I found emacs key bindings to be the kind, that if you could remember what type of key sequence it was you could figure it out. Generally things are some what consistent, Control + D, deletes the next character (right of the point). While Meta + D deletes the next word. Basically as I remember it for regular commands. A Control+Key combo does a smaller action while a Meta+Same Key combo does a larger action. Like if Control+Key works on words, Meta+Key works on lines e.t.c. And classes of commands I think generally had a consistent prefix. Control+X+Control+F Open/Find files, Control+X+Control+S Save current file, Control+X+Control+C exit editor, e.t.c Most of the mutli-file Editor related commands I recall focused on a Control+X prefix arrangement, like Contorl+X+2 to open a second buffer, Control+X+O to switch to the other e.t.c

I’ve tried a number of emacsen but never found one I really like enough to use a lot. GNU Emacs I don’t’ care much for but respect it among emacsen. I find it to fat and slow to be effective. On my desktop it’s no problem to run it, theres a lot of RAM and a fast CPU. On my laptop theres a budget CPU and moderate RAM so it’s slow as nails to get it’s motor warmed up. Not being much of a GNU Emacs man, I usually keep a fairly out of the box installation.

I haven’t tried XEmacs on my laptop but I don’t expect it to be faster then GNU Emacs. I think I would prefer XEmacs though.

MicroEMACS 4.0 and variants I’ve used and enjoyed, you could say MicroEMACS is my favorite. I like MicroEMACS in that it is small yet extensible. With just enough features to be useful Some what like Vi but with perks. Most of my issues with the editor would be solved by learning more about emacs ways of doing things and the marco language. I remember poking around a Traditional C style code base as well.

The only emacsen I find my self using often when I do actually use one. Is mg, a Micro GNU Emacs like editor maintained by OpenBSD. It’s a pretty bare bone emacs but it gets the job done nicely. Since I’m to stuborn to install Vim on my file server (OpenBSD) and would _NEVER_ dream of installing GNU Emacs on it. I’ll usually use mg when I need to edit multiple files. Although I could probably use Window and multiple instances of nVi for the same purpose.

I’ve tried Jove but never cared for it. An intermediate between the GNU Emacs/XEmacs variants and MicroEMACS variants I’d say.

I generally have preferences but I do believe in knowing a lot of things when possible. While I don’t remember most of the commands I learned in XEmacs, and prefer the Vi style of doing things more to my taste. Especially to my wrists and fingers liking !! (Escape Meta Alt Control Shiftritis). I can use Emacs fine but generally prefer not to. I generally prefer a light and fast emacsen to most other editors if I can’t have a Vi based one.

MicroMac

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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)