the future of Lucid Emacs

[Jamie Zawinski]

The release of GNU Emacs 19 from the FSF does not mean that Lucid Emacs is
going away. We will continue developing it, and merging in bug fixes and new
features from the FSF version as appropriate; we do not have plans to discard
the functionality that RMS has chosen not to include in his version.

The long awaited Great Redisplay Rewrite is well underway, in the new guise of
the Great Epoch Merge. Most of this work will end up being done by the Epoch
developers, but we're in close communication.

Within two months we expect to have a version of Lucid Emacs with the new
redisplay, which can run all Epoch 4 code without alteration (excepting those
areas where lemacs is incompatible with v18, that is.)

Lucid Emacs will run on dumb ttys shortly thereafter (if not at the same time.)

I will probably release a new version of lemacs in a few weeks which contains
some bug fixes and portability improvements, and a bunch of internal
improvements that aren't user visible. The next release after that will
probably be in a few months, when the Epoch merge has reached a point of
stability.

The latest released Lucid Emacs is 19.6, and can be found on
labrea.Stanford.EDU in pub/gnu/lucid/; see the README.

There is a version of Lucid Emacs in beta test now; send me mail if you'd like
to help out with it (hackers only, please.)

-- Jamie