Re: questions about porting and reality (was Re: New port - Berkley yacc)

> GNUemacs - mg is nice, but I really need shell-mode. Any idea
> what problems there are in porting it? I've thought
> of writing a Xlib fake so I could run lemacs

I don't know enough to comment one way or another on GNU emacs, and the ease
or difficulty of porting it to VSTA. It has been ported to many, many
systems, which one would hope would make the job easier, but it is also
large and complex.

My favourite emacs-like editor is Jove. If anybody wants to port it to VSTA,
let me know and I'll point you at the current beta version. While the
jovehacks don't want this version widely advertised, as they are hoping to
stabilize a new public release Real Soon Now, the current beta snapshot is
still vastly more stable and portable than the previous public release ---
most of the intervening work has been cleanup, rather than hacking in new
features.

Jove has interactive shell windows, filter-region (though a command),
shell-command, and compile-it (with friends parse-errors, next-error,
previous-error, and so on). It has keyboard macros, which can be recorded,
saved to files, edited, reloaded, bound to keys, etc. It has a moderately
parameterizable c-mode, as well as a lisp-mode.

It does not have an extension programming language.

It weighs in at about 200K for the executable, which is quite usable with no
other run-time files at all; the complete set of run-time files that comes
with it adds another 180K, including an analogue to /usr/lib/exrecover,
keycharts that display the keyboard bindings on many supported terminals,
jove.rc scripts that initialize special features for many known terminals,
and some 90K of reference manual accessible through the builtin help
facilities.

I think it might be a better size match to VSTA than GNU Emacs:-). Also,
since its internals are currently on the operating table, there's a
collection of experts on the jovehacks mailing list that can take your
output from "make 2>&1 | tee make.out" and help you do the port.

I'd undertake the port myself, but my PC is in the middle of a protracted
hardware upgrade downtime and is in pieces, so I don't have a VSTA-capable
platform right now.

-Bennett
bet@sbi.com
Received on Thu Jun 2 14:47:11 1994