xemacs vs emacs

[William Xu]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> In fact, at the present time there at least 4 active forks (GNU Emacs,
> XEmacs, SXEmacs, and Aquamacs).  It is unlikely that there will be any
> merges in the near to medium term.  If GNUstep becomes a reasonable
> desktop platform, it is possible that Aquamacs will merge into GNU
> Emacs (David Reitter, the author, hopes so), but at present Emacs
> vetos the merge on the grounds that Aquamacs provides only features
> that are usable on a proprietary platform (the Mac OS X GUI).  In some
> sense you could say that Aquamacs is a "friendly" fork.

Does Aquamacs really count as a fork? 

,----[ http://aquamacs.sourceforge.net/about.shtml ]
| Aquamacs features extensive customization: it will feel and behave
| mostly like an Aqua program - while still being a real GNU Emacs with
| all the ergonomy and extensibility you've come to expect from this
| world-class editor.
`----

Note it says "extensive customization".  It looks more like a GNU Emacs
+ Mac OS X customizations.  I doubt it'll ever be merged into GNU Emacs,
since it has changed some fundermental defaults, that makes it doesn't
even look like an Emacs anymore.  For example, by default in Aquamacs,
"every new buffer is a new frame", this is a disaster for me.  The other
example is CUA-mode enabled by default.  

-- 
William

http://williamxu.net9.org