One more note on Emacs and alternatives... Emacs 19.28 compiled on my Alpha with VMS 6.1. On my VAX I only have gcc 2.8.1, and after lots of trouble and batch time, I gave up. Having lost SOS and EDT fluency, I had a look at JED. Interestingly, recent sources compile both on the old VAX as well as on CHIMPY. JED's author still keeps the VMS dependencies in the distribution, but untested only. Erik On Thu, Oct 03, 2013 at 12:09:38AM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2013-10-02 23:59, Clem Cole wrote: On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com <mailto:mcguire at neurotica.com>> wrote: Emacs builds on most everything, and is packaged for most (all?) Linux distributions. Dave -- might want to tighten comment that a little. GNU-emacs builds on most anything with a 32 bit linear address space or greater. Other emacs implementations YMMV. In addition, a port of Emacs is actually not that trivial. Anyone familiar with TOPS-20 (or OS/8, or probably some other of DEC OSes) will probably recognize what I'm going to write next. Emacs "knows" how an executable looks like, and how the memory layout is of the running program, and how dynamic libraries work, and so on. Because, as a part of building emacs, emacs will start bare bone, read in all kind of initial lisp packages, compile stuff, and create a finalized emacs in memory that is running with all the bit and pieces of initialization code already run. At that point, emacs will do a memory dump to disk, and munge that file to be an executable. And that is the actual emacs binary. For any new system, and especially for any new binary image format, emacs needs to be taught all about it. But anyway, if the scope would be "emacs" and not "GNU emacs", then implementations exists for just about everything. I've written a small emacs-clone in TECO-8, there exists multiple Emacs clones for MS-DOS (maybe the best known is Epsilon). Stacken (the computer club at the Royal Institute of Technology) wrote an emacs clone called AMIS, which ran on VMS way back, as well as on Tops-10, RSTS/E, Norsk Data machines, and god knows what else. There is MicroEMACS, which is really easy to port around (I have it running on RSX). 2BSD have JOVE. I'm sure people can easily come up with other implementations... Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol