Re: Bug#729660: ITP: xemacs21 -- highly customizable text editor
On 11/16/2013 08:37 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
Well, emacs marks trailing white spaces as red blocks. At least in
non-windowed mode.
> 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.)
Ok. But this isn't really an argument for or against either version,
it simply originates from the fact that both are separate packages.
> 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.
Hmm, ok. There are rare cases where colors, i.e. contrast is poor on
emacs when editing certain text but it works fine in most cases
for me.
> 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.
I would love to hear these, too ;).
> 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.
I didn't know that people were fighting such wars over this. I thought
the original idea of XEmacs was to port emacs to X11 which had not
happened prior to that.
> 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.
I am not saying that I want to actively remove packages because I don't
like them. Please don't get me wrong. I was just worried about
reintroducing bugs.
>> 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.
Jeez, no need to freak out. I elaborated my reasons and I was just
asking questions. I am not hampering anyones freedom whatsoever,
I am just worried about bugs in general because I remember how utterly
annoying the last freeze was because of this.
And, really, I didn't start this discussion, there is no need to solely
bash me now for asking questions.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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