Switched from Epoch to Lucid Emacs?

[Robert T. Cotton]

Hans Muller writes:
>
> We're considering making a committment to Epoch or Lucid emacs and I
> was curious about why you decided to make the switch - beyond the fact
> that the hilit package makes the two comparable. Are there things
> about Lucid emacs you prefer over Epoch? Any thoughts you have on the
> subject would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Hans Muller

Hans,

I made the switch from emacs 18.57 to epoch 3.2 a while back, the
biggest reason being the multiple screens from one process. Having
the ability to edit multiple buffers of text, and have more than one
on the display at once was very important. One other consideration in
making the switch was region hilighting via a mouse drag. As more
people started writing code for epoch, features like displaying a
filename at the point in another screen, man pages in another screen
with hyper-text like See Also sections, a nifty info-mode and so on
became part of my .emacs. Epoch gave the the x-support that seemed
intuitive to have in this environment. One the source code hilighting
came out, I was hooked. I cannot live without it. It is the one
thing that kept me from moving to lemacs sooner. The reason I wanted
to stop using Epoch was it has some intermittent bugs, like spontaneous
quitting, killing random xterms when it did quit, and just an overall
level of unstableness, not unusable, just annoying.

Lemacs probably has a similar level of annoyance, but it also has some
very nice features. I like the menubar (alot). I was using the bam
package (I forgot by whom) when I was using epoch. It gave me the same
functionality the the menu bar in lemacs does. The hilighting package
in several time faster under lemacs than under epoch (although they
are different packages, hilit vs brightlight, I get the same
functionality at 1/4 the cost) The interface into x with lemacs is
much cleaner, I get, out of the box, functionality that one would
expect in an x-based editor that would take several packages under
epoch. Things like double and triple clicks for word and line
hilighting and the menubar. Although I am not an elisp programmer,
the overall interface to lemacs is much cleaner than with epoch. It
makes (sorry guys) epoch look like a hack.

Just my $.02.

Hope this helps,
Bob

[Marc Andreessen (aux acct)]

I made the switch from emacs 18.57 to epoch 3.2 a while back ...

The reason I wanted to stop using Epoch was it has some
intermittent bugs, like spontaneous quitting, killing random xterms
when it did quit, and just an overall level of unstableness, not
unusable, just annoying.

Umm, folks, Epoch 4.0 has been out for quite a while now and is quite
a bit more stable than 3.2 was. Spontaneous quitting, killing random
xterms, et al certainly ought to all be fixed in 4.0 (if they're not,
PLEASE let me know).

Thanks,

Marc

--
Marc ``Epoch is my Middle Name'' Andreessen
ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu

[Robert T. Cotton]

aux acct writes:
> I made the switch from emacs 18.57 to epoch 3.2 a while back ...
> The reason I wanted to stop using Epoch was it has some
> intermittent bugs, like spontaneous quitting, killing random xterms
> when it did quit, and just an overall level of unstableness, not
> unusable, just annoying.
>
> Umm, folks, Epoch 4.0 has been out for quite a while now and is quite
> a bit more stable than 3.2 was. Spontaneous quitting, killing random
> xterms, et al certainly ought to all be fixed in 4.0 (if they're not,
> PLEASE let me know).
>

Oops, Sorry, forgot to mention that I AM (was) running Epoch 4.0p2.

Bob