emacs - gnu, x ...?

[Benjamin Walkenhorst]

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On Friday, 1. August 2003 02:02, george donnelly wrote:
> thanks for the feedback. gui is not important, i guess i'm just looking for
> the neat features that everyone talks about - and with a minimum of
> resource usage as i would like to install it on a webserver as well so
> clients can use it over ssh.

Remember, GNU Emacs (and XEmacs, too, I suppose) is at its core a lisp 
interpreter. Many of Emacs' popular features are actually not "hard-wired" 
into emacs, but are add-ons written in lisp (though emacs comes with a 
helluva lot of them...). The tiny emacs-clones just emulate its look and 
superficial behaviour is the same, but they lack much of emacs' extensibility 
and customizability. 
If you just look for a small, easy-to-use editor, zile or µemacs is for you. 

GNU Emacs, on the other hand, is not that bad ressource-wise. It takes a lot 
of hard disk space, yes. It takes quite a lot of RAM for an editor, but not 
that much, either (less than 10MB on my machine, usually). CPU usage is 
pretty low (my machine: PentiumIII 450) mostly. 
You can also run GNU emacs in server mode. Users wanting to use emacs do not 
start a new instance of emacs, but just attach their client-sessions to the 
emacs-server. The main advantage I see is memory saved, and also some relief 
on the disks, for emacs remains in RAM all the time. 

kind regards,

Benjamin Walkenhorst

- -- 
Benjamin Walkenhorst
eMail: krylon at gmx.net
homepage: http://www.krylon.de
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