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Re: Bug#729660: ITP: xemacs21 -- highly customizable text editor



John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> writes:

> Russ claimed that XEmacs has some features that emacs doesn't, however,
> he wasn't able to mention them.

The one that bothered me the most when I switched to Emacs was that XEmacs
narrows the cursor when it as the end of a line, which is very nice for
detecting trailing whitespace.  I came up with a hack for Emacs that
mostly simulates this, but requires running elisp after every single
keystroke.

The faces handling between Emacs and XEmacs is way different, which means
that if you have extensive XEmacs customization, switching to Emacs can be
quite painful.  (It was for me.)

I believe that color handling is better in XEmacs than Emacs, although I
forget what I ran into and have subsequently gotten used to what Emacs
does.

There were various other things that I just did without when I switched
several years ago, but my recollections are hazy plus it's probably not
fair since I switched some time ago and Emacs has gotten better.  (I've
not personally used Emacs 24 yet, for example, so I don't know what it can
do.)  However, I've had discussions with other friends who use the Emacs
family heavily and who are still on XEmacs and they had a long list of
things that didn't work the way they wanted in Emacs.  They weren't things
that affected me personally, so I'm afraid I don't remember the details
beyond thinking at the time that they were reasonable concerns.

Emacs vs. XEmacs is a little like the perpetual vim vs. nvi argument.
They work differently.  Which is "better" can be a matter of opinion,
speaking as an nvi user who can't stand vim despite the fact that vim
clearly does more and nvi is in deep-freeze maintenance mode.  If you're
used to one of them, switching to the other one is painful.

If someone proposed to remove nvi from the archive because vim is better,
I would be quite annoyed.  If it ever did get removed from the archive, I
would probably adopt it and reintroduce it, because nvi is the editor that
I'm used to for small files and for root editing tasks, I want to keep
using it, and none of the things that are wrong with it are fatal for that
usage.

> As mentioned before by Paul and Andreas, we're wondering why all of a
> sudden Mark is picking up the package while it has been abandoned all
> the time and eventually removed. There was no ITA as far as I know.

Because he just now got around to it?  Because he thought he'd be able to
deal without it but decided he didn't want to?  Because he now has enough
free time to do a proper job of it?

And, rather more to the point, what the hell business is it of yours?
Other Debian Developers don't have to justify their priorities and the
disposition of their time to you.  I think this sort of grilling is quite
demoralizing and frustrating.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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