Moving on

[David Kastrup]

Jan Rychter <jan at rychter.com> writes:

> Just wanted to say goodbye -- I've been an XEmacs user since, I think,
> around 1996 or 1997.

Few remarks from one that never managed the switch the other way round.

> But, having recently switched to a Mac (I got tired of writing Linux
> drivers just so that I can use my hardware and do something real), I
> immediately started looking for a usable emacs. That turned out to be
> Emacs.app (http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/).
>
> I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I really liked XEmacs, its
> development philosophy, and a number of features that don't work as
> well in GNU Emacs.

Emacs App is not currently canonical GNU as far as I know, though it is
supposed to become integrated at one point of time.

> So, while I'm not entirely happy with political aspects of the move, I
> made the switch.

I don't think that a user-level switch is that much of a political
statement.  User numbers are not a value in itself.  If they were,
nobody would start free software projects (since then the user number is
0).

> Here are some impressions that accumulated over the years:
>
> Things I think are (or work) better in XEmacs:
>
>   -- apropos,
>   -- access to other documentation (those are minor things, but
>      for example describe-function isn't bound to a key by default, and
>      these things accumulate),

Hm?  How is it better not to bind describe-function to a key?

>   -- developer documentation,

I find my experience completely opposite.

> Things I always hated in XEmacs:
>
>   -- building it. The whole mess of configure options, getting them
>      wrong several times, forgetting what the right ones were, etc.

But Emacs is not better in that regard, I think.  A platform-specific
binary like Emacs.app is a different deal, and makes no statement about
the project as such.

> I have one other observation to make before I leave the list. The
> amount of energy that has been put into the AUCTeX packaging debates
> over the years would easily have sufficed to find a workable solution
> and maintain it.

There is the buzzphrase "quality time" for child raising: debating is a
small one-time investment independent from other such investments
without followup costs or commitment.

Anyway, the AUCTeX team found a workable solution and maintains it.  In
spite of the bad vibes and occasional vilification from the XEmacs team,
XEmacs users appreciate it.

However, we can't work wonders.  Where the basic functionality in XEmacs
is deficient (font locking comes into mind), there is not much except
pasting over the worst that we can do.

It is somewhat ironical that one of the roadblocks is the amount of red
tape that the XEmacs team wraps itself in, since they tend to
fingerpoint at the red tape of Emacs.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum