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Re: Continuing Linux Education [message #47353 is a reply to message #47306]

Tue, 07 February 2006 08:33

JD Smith
Messages: 850
Registered: December 1999

Senior Member

On Tue, 07 Feb 2006 11:52:09 +1300, Mark Hadfield wrote:

> JD Smith wrote:
>> ... By the way, Emacs 22, when it ships, should have a nice modern
>> version of IDLWAVE, so the need to upgrade will be much reduced.
>
> Just curious, JD: Why do you use Emacs in preference to Xemacs?

For those of you wondering what the difference between Emacs and
XEmacs is, have a read:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html

Mostly habit and inertia, but Emacs at (unreleased) version 22
actually surpasses XEmacs in many ways, at least for what I do. It
builds trivially for X11 on all Unixes and OSX, for Carbon under OSX,
Windows, etc. Some of my most used modes, like AUCTeX, target GNU
Emacs by default. The primary reasons for using XEmacs in the late
90's: image support, variable pitch font support, toolbars, scroll
wheel, etc. have vanished, as all of these things have been added to
Emacs with time.

XEmacs and Emacs continue to diverge, if slowly, and that makes
complex modes like IDLWAVE more difficult to maintain for both
platforms. IDLWAVE is developed primarily for Emacs, and then
"ported" (a heavy term for a simple operation on a few little bits of
code) to XEmacs. Also, since IDLWAVE is part of Emacs, and the Emacs
team has a somewhat more "structured" development model than the
XEmacs group, it's easier to target Emacs by default, and worry about
XEmacs compatibility later.

So, feel free to use either, but my personal observation is that
IDLWAVE under Emacs 22 offers the most stable and usable environment
for IDL development, with Emacs 21.X and XEmacs tied for second place.
Of course Emacs 22 hasn't been released yet (nor the IDLWAVE version
which supports it well), so your mileage may vary (and truthfully I
haven't even tried any bleeding-edge XEmacs versions).

JD

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[Message index]

		Continuing Linux Education By: David Fanning on Fri, 03 February 2006 16:12
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: JD Smith on Tue, 07 February 2006 08:33
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: Mark Hadfield on Tue, 07 February 2006 12:28
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: JD Smith on Tue, 07 February 2006 08:13
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: savoie on Wed, 08 February 2006 07:07
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: Mark Hadfield on Mon, 06 February 2006 14:52
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: MarioIncandenza on Mon, 06 February 2006 12:08
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: David Fanning on Mon, 06 February 2006 09:37
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: David Kastrup on Tue, 07 February 2006 17:33
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: JD Smith on Fri, 10 February 2006 09:53
		Re: Continuing Linux Education By: David Kastrup on Fri, 10 February 2006 15:21

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