editors

[LARRY at JPL-VLSI.ARPA]

From:  Larry Carroll <LARRY at JPL-VLSI.ARPA>

My experience supports Charles (HEDRICK at RUTGERS) comments.  At my last 
place of employment we used the Gosling EMACS in several ways--all of 
them fairly easy to set up with the Mock LISP and key-binding features 
of EMACS.

Several people were Wordstar freaks and one project mandated EDT.  We set 
up EMACS to look like either of them, depending on the login command file 
of the respective user.  Within a few months both sets of users had begun 
to use features in EMACS which were not in their subset.  Especially popular 
were the regular-expression FIND/REPLACE commands and the keyboard macro 
facility.

The extensibility of EMACS has also been used in an Ada class, where its 
teacher set up EMACS to recognize Ada keywords and automatically supply 
the remaining tokens.  It would also prompt for the variable parts of 
each command.  When I left the C programmers had begun to adapt the Ada 
keyword recognizer to C.  One of them had set up her login file so she 
could have EMACS spawn a subprocess to compile and link her programs 
in the background while she continued to use EMACS, then notify her when 

The only problem I noticed with Gosling's EMACS was the long time it took 
to come up--10 seconds with the VAX moderately loaded.  I understand the 
version of EMACS sold by CCA (in Cambridge, Mass) is somewhat faster.
Occasionally I would also notice an extension that was slow.  Those I 
looked into hadn't made good use of the compiled primitive commands and 
were fairly easy to speed up.

Currently I've got a proposal in here at JPL to buy EMACS for my group's 
VAX.  After getting used to the power and ease of use of EMACS I feel 
crippled using other editors.
					Larry @ JPL-VLSI
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