RE: Any interest in porting emacs 20.x to OpenVMS v7.x

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

   From: Jordan Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   I've coming to a decision point now that involves Emacs.  If I decide
   to dedicate myself to Emacs, I would certainly like a well supported,
   newer (20.x) release on OpenVMS, but I'm not sure that Emacs is what I
   need.

If you want support, I would actually suggest that there be a group of
people working on emacs or (ultimately) GNU software for VMS, not one
single person.  I've been the single person (although I've had a *lot* of
help from various people out there) behind the GNU on VMS project that I
started, and francly, I can't see that as a working concept.  It's simply
too big for one person in the long run.  Looking around, groups that I'm
involved with (like the OpenSSL effort) are proof of that concept.

The problem is sometimes to be able to get such a group together.  I
would expect that GNU might be enough to get a growing bunch around it.
I would be quite sad if I saw a single person struggle to do that with
everyone else expecting him or her to do all the work.  Been through
that, and that project is now more or less dead in the water...

   I've been using Emacs casually and I'm starting to get the hang of it,
   but I'm still not sure of how far Emacs can take me.

Well, I can only tell you what I use and have used emacs for:

  1. development.  Building a mode for your particular file type (if
     there isn't one available) is not very hard if you have some kind of
     grasp on lisp.
  2. compilation.  That's running make as a subprocess of emacs and
     getting the log in a buffer.  The neat thing is that emacs can then
     step through all the errors and warnings load the offending file and
     place point on the offending line.
  3. email.  I've used a number of packages, like mh-e, gnus, rmail, mew,
     vmsmail and some others I do not even remember).  I currently
     happily use mew (on Unix) and vmsmail (on VMS) as readers, and the
     usual built-in stuff plus a couple of hooks (that hack the mail
     headers and signature for me :-)) for sending.
  4. news.  Gnus, there's no question :-)
  5. shell buffer.  It's absolutely great to get shell output in a
     buffer, especially if you want to be able to scroll back, say, 2000
     lines...
  6. irc client.  That was along time ago.  I don't remember the names of
     the irc modes I used, but I think one was ZenIRC.
  7. online conference (lyskom) client.

But really, the reason I keep on using emacs is that it was the first
editor that I really used (or actually, the swedish variant called AMIS),
and I've definitely got comfortable with it.  I've never gotten around to
learn vi, edt or eve to the same level, although I've tinkered around
with all of them (and learned to thoroughly hate and then forgive vi, but
that's a whole other story :-)).

I guess that when you get down to it, what you feel most comfortable with
should be the choice you make.  If you think that emacs is worth the
learning curve, go for it with all your heart.  If you feel strongly for
using vi or vi-like stuff, go for that with all your heart.

I can't say anything about VILE at all, since I haven't even seen it...

HTH, HAND.

-- 
R Levitte, Levitte Programming;  Spannv. 38, I;  S-168 35  Bromma;  SWEDEN
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