There are currently irreconcilable differences in the views about technical, programming, design and organizational matters between RMS and the XEmacs development team which provide little hope for a merge to take place in the short-term future. If you have a comment to add regarding the merge, it is a good idea to avoid posting to the newsgroups, because of the very heated flamewars that often result. Mail your questions to xemacs-beta@xemacs.org and bug-gnu-emacs@prep.ai.mit.edu.

For a detailed description of the differences between GNU Emacs and XEmacs and a detailed history of XEmacs, check out the User-Visible Editing Features XEmacs in general tries hard to conform to exist user-interface standards, and to work "out-of-the-box" without the need for obscure customization changes. GNU Emacs, particularly version 21, has gotten better about this (in many cases by copying the XEmacs behavior!), but still has some weirdnesses.

Unfortunately even the naming of these two applications has become politicized. Much of this stems from RMS, who has a history of politicizing similar issues. (Compare the controversy over "Lignux" and "GNU/Linux".) We would prefer that the terms "XEmacs" and "GNU Emacs" be used, which are neutral and acceptable to most people. RMS, however, is not willing to accept these terms.

XEmacs is the result of the time and effort of many people, and the active developers have changed over time. There are two major components of the XEmacs effort -- writing the code itself and providing all the support work (testing the code, releasing beta and final versions, handling patches, reading bug reports, maintaining the web site, managing the mailing lists, etc. etc.). Neither component would work without the other.

A GNU emacs 'matlab-mode' is available via anonymous ftp from csi.jpl.nasa.gov as pub/matlab/util/matlab-mode.el

You can't use the same copy of Gnus in both as the Lisp files are byte-compiled to a format which is different depending on which Emacs did the compilation. Get one copy of Gnus for Emacs and one for XEmacs.

Yes! It uses the X11 ('http://cygwin.com/xfree/') Windows interface. From a remote login shell, this "emacs -nw" works fine. There is also a non-X11 version which just provides the text-only terminal interface. Use Cygwin Setup to install either one (or both).

ILISP is a powerful GNU-Emacs interface to many dialects of Lisp, including Lucid, Allegro, {A}KCL, IBCL, and CMU. Written by Chris McConnell <ccm+@cs.cmu.edu> and now maintained by Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@cs.nyu.edu> and Rick Busdiecker <rfb@lehman.com>. It is available by anonymous ftp from h.gp.cs.cmu.edu:/usr/rfb/ilisp/ [128.2.254.156] as the file ilisp-5.6.tar.gz. It is also available in the CMU AI Repository in ftp.cs.cmu.

GNU Emacs and XEmacs are related open-source text editors. Both derive from GNU Emacs version 18; the split between the two happened in 1991 (for comparison, the oldest versions of GNU Emacs date from 1984). For information on GNU Emacs, see http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html.

No not at the moment. The GNU Emacs bindings would be added as a compatibility file (gnu.emf) in much the same way that the me3.8 bindings are added, see me3_8.emf.

XEmacs is a branch version of Emacs. It was first called Lucid Emacs, and was initially derived from a prerelease version of Emacs 19. In this FAQ, we use the name “Emacs” only for the official version. Emacs and XEmacs each come with Lisp packages that are lacking in the other. The two versions have some significant differences at the Lisp programming level.

RTFM. Really, it's a great manual. Here's a list of commands that should allow you to use Emacs. The notation is pretty obvious, but it's explained in the manual anyway. M-w :Copy text between point and mark (point is the cursor. The selection is copied to the "kill ring"). M-y :cycle back through previous selection (try it after copying a few bits of text to see what I mean). C-h i :Go to Info mode (in Info mode, type m followed by a manual name, such as emacs to see that manual).

You should be using frames and abbrevs. Also check out the "desktop" feature. You should be answering mail with Emacs, probably with Gnus. Maybe registers as well, but I haven't started using them yet. Your .emacs should probably be 50 lines or more and should include a few simple functions attached to mode hooks etc.

The free software movement is something I care deeply about. The idea is that users of software should have rights as well, the right to use software how they wish, the right to adapt the software to their needs and to share improvements for the benefit of the user community. Big, proprietary, monopolistic companies like Microsoft are making this difficult in today's world, but there are alternatives.

The reason for an Emacs package not to be included in XEmacs is usually one or more of the following: The package has not been ported to XEmacs. This will typically happen when it uses GNU-Emacs-specific features, which make it fail under XEmacs. Porting a package to XEmacs can range from a trivial amount of change to a partial or full rewrite. Fortunately, the authors of modern packages usually choose to support both Emacsen themselves.

The archives contain no less than three verilog modes for emacs: ftp.siliconlogic.com:/pub/comp.lang.verilog/verilog.el.Z Rick Eversole at Cadence maintains a verilog mode and occasionally posts it to comp.lang.verilog. At this time it supports only FSF 18.xx and Epoch. FSF 19.xx and Lucid Emacs (lemacs) are not supported. It is available at the archive site, or send email to eversole@cadence.com to request a copy if you have missed the posting and can not get it from the archive of comp.lang.

Gnu Emacs 18.55 (with Leonard N. Zubkoff's patches for SR10.2) seems to have a problem with shell subprocesses. At times the 0x0 character (displayed as ^@ by Emacs) appears in buffers running a shell. While this is only a nuisance running an inferior shell, it is a problem when running the M-x compile command: The C-x ' (next-error) function is unable to process the compiler output.

For a concise description of the current situation with XEmacs, see this message from the Cygwin mailing list: 'http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-11/msg00609.html'.

If your organisation has merged since achieving Investor in People status, then it is likely that you will need to have an assessment again in order to maintain your status and continue to display the logo. To investigate your current position further, you should contact the Regional Quality Centre closest to the Head Office location of your company. Alternatively, please contact your nearest Regional Quality Centre.

GNU is an acronym for Gnu's Not Unix. A gnu is a large beast and is the motif of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). GNU is a 'recursive' acronym. Richard Stallman is the founder of the FSF and the creator of the GNU General Public License. One of the purposes of the FSF is to promote and develop free alternatives to proprietary software. The GNU project is an effort to create a free Unix-like operating system from scratch and was started in 1984.

GNU Chess is text based, open source chess engine. It provides the logic for controling the computer's moves when playing the computer. It will give you a far more challenging game of chess than any engine I might try to create.

If you would like to use Gnu utilities for compiling, and for general environment feel, you can do it. Start by adding the following line to the end of your .cshrc file: This should set you up to use all of the gnu utilities rather than the Sun-supplied complements. Please be aware that /usr/um/gnu/bin also contains replacements for commonly used Unix utilities such as find, ls, and grep.

Debian GNU/Linux is a particular distribution of the Linux operating system, and numerous packages that run on it. In principle, users could obtain the Linux kernel via the Internet or from elsewhere, and compile it themselves. They could then obtain source code for many applications in the same way, compile the programs, then install them into their systems. For complicated programs, this process can be not only time-consuming but error-prone.