Talk:Gosling Emacs

message: This article has so much "citation needed" that it makes it unreadable and it discouraged me to improved it!  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.37.78.212 (talk) 12:36, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation needed 

message: I may give some information on the display code...
The display update code in Emacs is very efficient for what iit has been designed for but this was not Emacs!
The display update code was originally designed for an ASCII art editor and Gosling did write an article in CACM (1979 IIRC) and the reason why it is efficient for this ASCII art editor is that there are frequent cases where you need to update more than one place at once in such an editor. For a normal text editor, this display update is an overkill that does not help. A simple update mechanism that is either able to insert or remove chars at a single position is fully sufficient for a text editor. In fact, the display update code in Emacs is worse than the one used in vi.
I know this because around 1985 I wrote a display update code that is much more efficient than the one used in Emacs and in vi. My code is only able to insert or remove chars at a single position and a modify operation is emulated by a delete followed by an insert. As a result of this simple idea, my code needs a lot less CPU time and also does a faster terminal update.
My code is available in the editor ved that is part of the Schily Tools (download a recent schily-*.tar.bz2 archive) and was written without the knowledge on Emacs internals but if you compare the resultant terminal activities for an update, it may appear to be similar to what Emacs does.
As I know that Stallman have been told by UNIPRESS to remove the Gosling code (note that Stallman took the UNIPRESS variant of the Emacs source and published it for money under the name GNU emacs), I wrote a mail to Gosling and asked for an explanation of his code to make sure that my code is really different with respect to all aspects of its internals. Gosling then sent me a hint to his CACM article. BTW: if you compare the Gosling Emacs and a recent GNU emacs, the display update is still similar with respect to performance and method. Schily (talk) 16:13, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Display Update Code 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Gosling Emacs. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110728022656/http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/~ashawley/gnu/emacs/ConText-Kelty.pdf to http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/~ashawley/gnu/emacs/ConText-Kelty.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 14:04, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I wonder if anyone has access to the early distribution of emacs referenced here: https://github.com/ildus/bsd_indent/blob/master/README
I'm particularly looking at the version of indent that came with it. DAWillcox (talk) 16:16, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I checked some early Emacs distributions here: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/, but I didn't see any indent.c or similar. Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 08:10, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for looking, and no, I don't see it anywhere there, either. (There may have been an indent.c, but the source was multiple .c files in an indent directory.) I wrote original indent in 1976 at the University of Illinois. Apparently it was included in some emacs release in the 80's and from there found its way into BSD Unix releases. And from there to Linux and a bunch of other platforms. Many, many fingers have tweaked it in the ensuing decades but the underlying (rather ugly) structure is still visible. I'm trying to find a version as close to the original as possible. The earliest I've found so far is from the late 80s. It still had the original University of Illinois copyright notice along with Berkley copyrights. Sadly, later releases don't acknowledge the early history. DAWillcox (talk) 14:45, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  I wonder if anyone has access to a really early distribution