Re: Emacs-like editors

David Damerell <[email protected]> Distortion writes:
> I prefer emacs to vi for most things; but I prefer vi to an editor
> that happens to have Emacs's cursor motion keybindings but basically
> isn't Emacs.
> 
> There's no way that an editor that actually _is_ Emacs in any
> meaningful sense will fit on a floppy.



Sorry if this is slightly off-topic.  I don't get into the "emacs
vs. vi" or any other software debates (I gave these up in the days of
BASIC vs. FORTH!), but factual errors bug me.

The a fact is, there was a very usable clone of Emacs for MS-DOS that
fit on a 360K floppy.  It is called FreEMACS.  It didn't just have the
default Emacs key bindings; it also had TeX (and Fortran!) modes, and
a lisp-like language for extensions, called MINT.  I used it all the
time back in the 1990-92 era, before PC-based unix clones and Emacs
for Windows became available (to me).

You can still download it at 

      http://www.lanet.lv/simtel.net/msdos/freemacs-pre.html


You could fit it on a 360K floppy formatted in MS-DOS with the "/s"
option, and therefore have a bootable system with an Emacs-like editor
on a 360K floppy in 1990.  No network support in the default install.
;-)



--Robert