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by vidarh 4101 days ago
A lot of us only cares about the very basics, and pick emacs (or variations) only because when the choice between editor families that are "always" available it stands between vi/vim and emacs.

Microemacs and derivatives like MG or uemacs dates back to the mid 80's, and has been ported to pretty much any platform and OS you can think of (first time I came across one of them was on the Amiga in the late 80's), so they're practical if you want the same experience "everywhere", including places too limited to bog down with a full emacs, and when you don't want that experience to be vim.
1 comments
boomlinde 4101 days ago
In what sense is Emacs (or emacs-likes) "always" available? In most operating systems it is something will have to be installed explicitly, while I haven't seen a unix-like without a vi-clone or nano in a while. Hopefully the lack of emacs-likes can be addressed with something like mg, but so far I don't see it a lot in the wild.

I believe that Workbench 2+ for the Amiga came bundled with MicroEMACS, though!

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vidarh 4101 days ago
In the sense that Emacs-alike's, like vi(m) have been ported to pretty much every OS in existence. It's not necessarily installed, but one will be available.

And Nano is only an option for me to escape the horror of vi if I for some reason can't install an emacs-like.

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lispm 4101 days ago
Mac OS X comes with GNU Emacs. Generally installing GNU Emacs is about one of the first things I do on any machine I use.

Other than that I use Emacs variants in Common Lisp for programming. Mostly derivatives of Hemlock, an Emacs editor written in Common Lisp by CMU in the early 80s.

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