Re: GNU philosophy[was Re: Hurd on VMware ?]
On Fri, Mar 03, 2000 at 11:30:18PM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > This is the reason I stopped using Xemacs and started using emacs even
> > though I prefer Xemacs.
> Huh? Is there some reason that xemacs is not free software?
XEmacs most certainly is free software---it's GPLd. It's just not under the
FSF copyright. XEmacs was forked from an early version of Emacs 19, because
a number of people wanted a more X-friendly version of Emacs. The arguments
occurred because RMS wants to keep GNU Emacs under FSF copyright, and the
maintainers of XEmacs (notably Jamie Zawinsky) didn't want to hand copyright
on their modifications over the FSF, so the changes have never been merged
back into GNU Emacs.
I use GNU Emacs rather than XEmacs, but not because of philosophical
differences; I don't like the XEmacs modifications. I can make XEmacs work
the way I want it to by turning off the Windows-style toolbar, changing the
faces so that text appears light-on-dark rather than dark-on-light, and
rebinding all the keys they've changed (notably Home and End, which they
have bound to start-of-line and end-of-line but GNU Emacs binds as
start-of-buffer and end-of-buffer), but why should I bother when GNU Emacs
works the way I like it already? ;)
I would dearly like face support on the console in GNU Emacs---it's meant to
be coming in the next version. XEmacs has half-hearted face support on the
console, but it's not terribly useful...
--
Adam Sampson
azz@gnu.org
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