Re: History Re: Debunking Emacs merits over GUI - Re: package for Email

[Po Lu]

Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> writes:

>> 2. Free Software
>>
>> While RMS' goal may have been laudable, many (most)
>> programmers could not see how to monetize their work in
>> a free software environment and, so, went where the money
>> was more plentiful. Without the investment of big bucks that
>> copyrighted software could command, development of Emacs in
>> the 90s slowed to a crawl and depended on the programmer
>> "with an itch". Good stuff was done, but it could've been so
>> much more. This is why Emacs development took 40 years
>> whereas things might've happened faster in the more
>> capitalistic world (but Emacs would've been very different
>> beast!).

I remind everyone that proprietary versions of Emacs developed by
computer companies have existed in the past, along with versions that
were free software, also developed by computer companies.

Instead of making such generalizations, I suggest looking at the fate of
all of those Emacsen: CCA Emacs, Unipress Emacs, Lucid Emacs and more.

>> 5. Smartphones
>>
>> The iPhone is still not capable of supporting Emacs and
>> I don't know how well Android could support Emacs. Even if
>> they could support Emacs, Smartphones are GUI-intensive, so
>> not really an environment for a text editor.
>
> They don't have to be, there are text-based Android apps and
> plugin a physical keyboard and you should have, I don't
> know, something. I prefer the comfort of other solutions but
> it should be possible, and absolutely so in the long run, for
> people who wants that.

There's also the feature/android branch, which is almost ready to be
merged into master.

Also, I don't use a physical keyboard with my Android device, yet Emacs
works fine for reading and composing mail and news.