On Nov 16, 2013, at 03:32 PM, Mark Brown wrote: >There are other users who do use graphical mode, indeed I was reminded >at the mini-Debconf today that the main reason XEmacs got forked was >that GNU Emacs was too resistant to implementing a GUI. I guess some >people use menus or whatever but I expect you'll find it's mostly just >to make it look pretty and smoother interaction with other programs.
Well, this is getting off topic, but the real history is more subtle, complicated, and contentious than that. At least as I remember it. I was an early user of Lucid's Energize product and thus Lucid Emacs, the precursor of XEmacs. The wikipedia page on XEmacs has a decent, short, and neutral summary of the history. Lucid Emacs was groundbreaking for lots of reasons, most visibly its embrace of X and all the things a real windowing system brings with it. Syntax highlighting (font-locking) was another innovation, though when GNU Emacs adopted similar features they were implemented differently (and at the time, I felt, not as well, since I did the original patches to support the dual comment styles of C++ in both editors). I haven't looked at the guts of either editor in years. -Barry
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