Talk:XEmacs

New version in 2023
The preview has been updated for the first time in a decade: https://www.xemacs.org/Releases/21.5.35.html The info box needs an update. I do not know the syntax. Liam Proven (talk)

fork in the first line
The Mac OS X article does not have BSD in the first line, and Windows does not have OS/2 in the first line. So I think having a large section dedicated to the split between the GNU project and the XEmacs hackers is quite enough. This article needs to be a description of XEmacs not just another article about GNU Emacs.


 * Please sign your posts. A much lower percentage of Mac OS X and Windows are BSD and OS/2, so these cases are not analogous. Gronky 15:43, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Do you have proof for that, XEmacs and GNU Emacs went their separate ways 15 years ago. While OS X imports code from Free/Open Source all the time. 82.36.234.82 21:18, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * LOL. "Free/Open Source" != "BSD". And OS X was a fork of NeXT. From a user's POV, XEmacs was emacs, while OS X is certainly not BSD. -- Jibal (talk) 04:49, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

The article mentions the fork issue throughout the article, so it should probably be quickly mentioned in the summary, no? The XEmacs Web site mentions it at . They've hardly "went their separate ways 15 years ago". My understanding is there is lots of synchronization of source code between projects. According to the XEmacs maintainers:


 * Almost all features of GNU Emacs are supported in XEmacs. The maintainers of XEmacs actively track changes to GNU Emacs while also working to add new features.

--69.54.29.23 12:52, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay fair enough on mentioning the fork in the title as long as we do not go back to having a whole article about politics with no description of the software itself Zeth 01:01, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

A fork and yet not a fork
Note the history does not match up to the rhetorical use of XEmacs as an example of a fork, so it is best not to overegg it as a canonical example of a fork. The modern GNU Emacs and XEmacs were both forks in one sense, both were based on the unreleased version of Emacs version 19 but both deliberately differed from it. When species A mutates, you now have B and C (rather than A and B).


 * That's what a fork is. Think of a fork on the road.  You're saying it's not a branch.  --194.98.58.121 (talk) 15:55, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

You're both wrong (and pointlessly pedantic). A "fork" in software terminology is in fact a branch--a modified copy. And that's what XEmacs was--a fork/branch of GNU Emacs. That the released version of GNU Emacs 19 was different from the code that XEmacs copied is irrelevant--that it was forked from top-of-tree rather than from the last version 18 release doesn't make it not a fork of GNU Emacs. -- Jibal (talk) 04:36, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Recent changes
I have attempted to make the page more positively about Xemacs, (rather than just talk about the split with GNU Emacs), as well as add references. Some changes have been reversed, which is fine, but can those judging, please try and make things better, rather than just revert changes for the sake of it. Again, this is not an article about GNU Emacs, it is an article about XEmacs, so while mentioning the fork, the rest does not have to just be about GNU Emacs. We want to know about the features and the over a decade and a half since then. Note also I am not just trying to pimp XEmacs, I am actually a GNU Emacs user.

Issues concerning much older versions of this page
The page has been rewritten recently, so the issues below do not apply but are kept for historical reasons.

Code Sharing

 * "Since both emacsen share the same license, code can be transplanted back and forth between them"

You forgot to add "... but because FSF want to have copyright assignments for all of GNU Emacs code they can't just take code from XEmacs". --Taw
 * Done. --CYD

Image Display

 * "Inline images are available without tricks."

Could someone clarify this statement? As far as I can see, inline images work fine in Emacs 21, without any hackery. --CYD
 * If the statement does no longer apply, feel free to fix it. IIRC Emacs 20 was not able to display images inline without some clever kludgery. ----Robbe

Windows Implementation
Can anything objective be said about the pros and cons of GNU Emacs vs. Xemacs in their native Win 95/98/ME implementations? (Ditto Win NT/2000/XP implementations). I think many stuck on Windows, but eager to give Common Lisp a try, find deciding between the two emacsen as difficult as learning the emacs way. --Anonymous


 * If you want to give common lisp a try then download clisp for windows. Emacs Lisp is not a full featured implementation of common lisp.  I run XEmacs on Windows simply because I prefer the XEmacs philosophy of open source as opposed to Stallman's... XEmacs has a few features I like which haven't yet made it into the GNU Emacs native windows port (Please don't encourage me to run Cygwin)
 * Inline Images (images in buffers)
 * Automatic Package management
 * extents (buffer regions with specific properties)
 * Proper dialog boxes (dialog boxes only appear when interacting with the GUI naturally)
 * buffer tabs (similar to other MDI environments, if you like that)
 * more customizable options available in the menubars (I hate trawling the customize buffers to that one elusive option :-) )


 * I encourage someone to counter this list with things that GNU Emacs for Win provides, and maybe if there's a useful set of arguments for each editor they could be merged into the article.  Stu Hacking   talk  14:53, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

OXYMORON
Do we need all these details about the various versions and subversions in the article? I would think that an external link would suffice. --Oleg Alexandrov 22:50, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Do we need any of this? I think these particular version names show something of the irreverent character of XEmacs, in contrast with More Sensible Emacs. The 21.5 vegetable series is less interesting. --Anonymous

good documentation or not

 * "In the past, some detractors have complained that because of its more aggressive, features-driven approach, XEmacs internals are less consistent and less extensively documented than GNU Emacs. Actually, the opposite is true: XEmacs comes with a 140-page internals manual (Wing and Buchholz, 1997), making it one of the most well-documented software projects, and has been more open to change than GNU Emacs, with the result that its internals have been extensively rewritten to improve consistency and follow modern programming conventions stressing data abstraction."

Well does it have good documentation or not? Why does the article say it has poor documentation then contradict itself the next sentence and say it has good documentation? --68.40.198.96 18:51, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
 * It does not contradict itself: the first opinion is sourced to detractors. --Maru (talk) Contribs 19:23, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

The X
I've always thought the X stood for "extended" or "extendable", contrary to the more intuitive guess that it comes from the X window system. I see this article currently says it does come from the X window system. Is this correct, or just an incorrect, though intuitive, guess?
 * The article is wrong. It started life as Lucid Emacs. Lucid went bust and other companies wanted to carry on shipping Lucid Emacs. However, using the trademark was legally ambiguous because no one knew who would control the trademark after the dust settled. So X is for brand X, nothing to do with X Windows or X.org.

out of date
This article is out of date. The XEmacs project died years ago ... the last software change is from 2013 and the last update to the website is from 2017. -- Jibal (talk) 04:20, 26 December 2021 (UTC)