tlug: Emacs/Xemacs Question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jack" == Jack Morgan <yojack@example.com> writes:

    Jack> In a nutshell, what is the difference between Emacs and Xemacs. 

 o User interface:  XEmacs does images, proportional fonts, multiple
   fonts, and audio better (or at all).  Some of these will allegedly
   show up in Emacs 21, but that ain't here yet.[1]  Menu bars,
   toolbars.  More compliance to industry standards in layout (File on
   the far left, Help on the far right ;-)

 o Package system:  XEmacs has a home-grown PMS with far less
   capability than dpkg or rpm, but at least for most packages quite
   sufficient.  You don't have to wait for the next release of the
   editor to conveniently upgrade your MUA or whatever.

   Related to this is a much more rational directory layout, and
   automated checking for "shadowed" libraries.  Many fewer upgrade
   problems due to an old library being "in the path ahead of the new
   one."

 o XEmacs has more prepackaged packages.  Mostly they work with Emacs,
   but you have to find them and often struggle to install and then
   make them work with the current version.  Some packages are not
   supported to work with Emacs (VM is a prominent example).

 o XEmacs Customization is GUI.  (Custom is a Lisp library that
   provides dialogs for customizing Emacs and Lisp package features,
   especially text faces.)

 o XEmacs supports proprietary stuff.  At present this is not
   important to Linux people (the examples I know of are vc-cc.el,
   supporting the ClearCase version control system and stuff for Sun's
   Toolworks; support for ssh in shells and EFS was proposed but rms
   quashed that, and by the time the Forces of Righteousness had
   regrouped it looked moot because of lsh and openssh).

 o XEmacs is a bazaar which recently made its first non-dynastic
   transfer of power (previous changes of maintainer were hand-offs
   from a maintainer to a chosen successor) peacefully.  Emacs is the
   canonical example of cathedral development.  XEmacs developers have
   been denied admission to GNU mailing lists; subscription to XEmacs
   lists is automatic, and they are archived at www.xemacs.org.  The
   XEmacs CVS tree is open to anyone (http://cvs.xemacs.org/).

 o Programming philosophy: XEmacs uses many abstract data types, so
   proper accessor functions must be used.  This nearly eliminates the
   data corruption common in Emacs 20.x under Mule.  Emacs adheres to
   the basic Lisp "everything is accessible" model.

 o XEmacs synchs to Emacs, but not vice-versa.  This means that XEmacs
   always lags Emacs' new features by a few months.

 o Emacs has better Mule support; the Mule people are prohibited from
   looking at XEmacs code now that they are an official part of the
   Emacs development process.  (Actually, that's been true for years.)

 o XEmacs will have some Unicode support in the 21.2 release.  Mule is
   dragging its feet on that AFAIK.

 o Emacs has rms; XEmacs had jwz.  Hmmmmm.....

I'm sorry if this looks biased in favor of XEmacs; a look at NEWS for
20.0~5 shows many minor items mostly visible to Lisp programmers, and
most of the major ones pertain to obsolete packages like RMail or
packages like Gnus and flyspell which are of course also available in
XEmacs.  (And in XEmacs you have the advantage that you can try out
the latest Gnus without much risk, you can easily reinstall that stable
package.)

Emacs tends to be smoother overall, because XEmacs's new features are
often buggy.  Emacs generally doesn't release new features (even to
beta testers) until they're pretty solid.  (That wasn't true of Mule,
though, that was a mess.)  Especially Emacs Mule tends to be more
solid than XEmacs Mule (despite what I just said, that was teething
pains not reflecting current status); Emacs has all the specialists
from ETL on their team.[2]


Footnotes[3]: 
[1]  Not to mention that by the time Emacs has a display engine
capable of doing proportional fonts, XEmacs will have a Gtk+
version,courtesy of financing from beopen.com.  Whether this will be
releasable or not in 21.3 is another question; but it is already more
functional as a screen editor than say xedit, and of course Lisp
scripts that don't use the GUI are unaffected.

[2]  But Ben Wing is back, XEmacs21.2 will have Unicode support for
sure, and 21.3 will probably have Unicode as the internal encoding.
We shall see....

[3]  footnote.el is a package not available in the Emacs distribution,
although it was contributed years ago.

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What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."
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