Moving on

Hi, Just wanted to say goodbye -- I've been an XEmacs user since, I think, around 1996 or 1997. 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. On the other hand, I find that there are more important things in life than worrying about your editor's support for UTF-8, dealing with window-resizing bugs or fighting alpha-level code just to get antialiased fonts. The switch was also really painful, as old habits die hard, and it turned out lots of my code was XEmacs-specific. So, while I'm not entirely happy with political aspects of the move, I made the switch. This means that I won't be using XEmacs anymore and I won't be maintaining the escreen package anymore, either (not that I really had to do any maintaining at all). It also means I won't be developing vx-mode anymore, I'm hoping MacSpeech Dictate will be able to replace that solution. 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), -- developer documentation, -- extents, In general, I enjoyed elisp coding much more under XEmacs. 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. -- having to build it, as the 21.4 distribution binaries are useless in the real world (multilingual world that uses UTF-8), -- the crashes. Things that are better in Emacs.app: -- It works. Meaning I can download the DMG, install it in 5 seconds, and have an editor with UTF-8, antialiased fonts, that remembers its window size and does not change it when switching elscreens. And the most common misconception about XEmacs: "oh, I don't use XEmacs, I want an emacs that I can use without X, in a terminal window as well". 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. Thanks for the very enjoyable 12 years or so, and thanks for all your work. I wish XEmacs all the best in the future. --J. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta