I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant [LWN.net]

I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 14:03 UTC (Thu) by wlach (subscriber, #23397)
In reply to: I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant by mmarkov
Parent article: Emacs chooses Bazaar

Speaking of, does anyone know why GNU Emacs seems to have won out over XEmacs? If you'd asked
me a few years ago, I would have thought that the latter's more open development model would
have pushed it ahead. I'm surprised to see most of the exciting feature development work
(Unicode, Xft fonts) going into the GNU version.

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I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 22:10 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It died largely because it had, oh, one really active developer at any 
given time, and right now it has none (Ben Wing being too busy).

It's reanimatable, of course: it's free software...

xemacs liveness

Posted Mar 17, 2008 12:10 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

While not an xemacs user (maybe I should become one just to be contrary :-), this thread prompted me to visit its site out of curiousity. Doesn't look so dead to me, eg. there is more traffic in mailing lists than in many other FOSS projects (eg see http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2008-March/thread.html). The latest stable release is 1/2 years old, which also is not so unusual.

xemacs liveness

Posted Mar 17, 2008 20:16 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The pace of development at the moment is very, very slow. The unstable 
release is moving at the speed of most projects' stable releases, because 
nobody working on it has the time to do major development. (I include 
myself in this to some extent. I don't have hg commit privs largely 
because I, sigh, wouldn't have the time to do anything with them. I need 
some way to double the number of hours in the day, or perhaps triple 
them...)

But it works, and is revivable if someone steps up to the plate *looks at 
self guiltily*

I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 22:11 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

btw, XEmacs 21.5.28 has support for both Unicode and Xft fonts (not 
flawless, but working well enough to use).