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by pjmlp 482 days ago
Back in the XEmacs days, when I cared about it, graphical widgets, better extension points, and not so religious against usability features as Emacs understand the stewardship from the mighty Stallman.

Nowadays no idea, I even lost track if Emacs finally does everything that was special about XEmacs, 30 years ago.
2 comments
bitwize 482 days ago
XEmacs has been out of maintenance for frickin' years, because GNU Emacs caught up back in the 2000s or so. If GNU Emacs is still missing in some ways, XEmacs is "not better enough" to justify a switch for the vast majority of users of Emacsen.
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pjmlp 482 days ago
Missed the remark about 30 years ago? Of course it is out of maintenance for frickin' years.

The question was more did GNU Emacs caught up, or did the folks that cared about XEmacs moved into better pastures?

(X)Emacs was relevant to me, because there was still no IDE culture in UNIX land back then, like on PC and Amiga, and between vi and (X)Emacs (vim was yet to be a thing) definitly (X)Emacs, when UNIX IDEs finally became mature enough, I moved on.

If it is installed, I will use it, but won't go out of my way to use it daily as back then.

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binary132 481 days ago
Not quite following. You’re saying there used to be a motive to use forks, because Emacs proper wasn’t healthy? At this point, standard GNU Emacs is about as good as it gets in my book, plus the package library is of very high quality compared to the other editor stacks out there. People just don’t get into writing emacs packages if they’re not in the 1% of the 1% of developers in the first place. Almost zero slop.
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pjmlp 481 days ago
Yes, lets say Guile never really makes as an Elisp replacement, that would be another case, although apparently Guile-Emacs effort was relaunched, lets see.

30 years ago it was another matter, Emacs culture back then was pretty much against the cool features from XEmacs, a bit like GCC versus what made clang exist in first place, in terms of how Stalman would vouch against such features.

In any case, the 1% remark is quite relevant given how many still reach out to Emacs in modern times.

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binary132 481 days ago
What made Clang exist, and become successful, was having a massive corporate backer and a nonfree license.
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