Mg 2a README May 15, 1988 Mg (mg) is a Public Domain EMACS style editor. It is "broadly" compatible with GNU Emacs, the latest creation of Richard M. Stallman, Chief GNUisance and inventor of Emacs. GNU Emacs (and other portions of GNU as they are released) are essentially free, (there are handling charges for obtaining it) and so is Mg. You may never have to learn another editor. (But probably will, at least long enough to port Mg...) Mg was formerly named MicroGnuEmacs, the name change was done at the request of Richard Stallman. Mg is not associated with the GNU project, and most of it does not have the copyright restrictions present in GNU Emacs. (However, some of the system dependent modules and the regular expression module do have copyright notices, specificly the VMS/primos termcap routines and the amiga specific routines. Look at the source code for exact copyright restrictions.) The Mg authors individually may or may not agree with the opinions expressed by Richard Stallman in "The GNU Manifesto". Documentation of Mg is in the TeX file mg.tex. This should be formatted with the TeX text formatter and printed. A start towards a mg programmers guide is in mgprog.doc, and some of the changes from 1b are mentioned briefly in mg2a.change. This program is intended to be a small, fast, and portable editor for people who can't (or don't want to) run real Emacs for one reason or another. It is compatible with GNU because there shouldn't be any reason to learn more than one Emacs flavor. We have excised most MicroEMACS features that were incompatible with the big brother, and added missing features that seemed essential. There are at least two other major versions of MicroEMACS in circulation. One comes from Daniel Lawrence, (based on an old version from Dave Conroy) and is several versions have been posted to usenet. It uses a 3.x version numbering scheme, and the latest I know about is 3.9i. It has some features not found in Mg, missing others, is bigger, and is incompatible with GNU Emacs. It might be a better choice for you if you *must* have something not present here and can't run GNU. Another variety uses a different numbering scheme, and is up to v30. This also comes from mod.sources, and is the latest version from the original MicroEMACS author Dave Conroy. Mg is derived from this version, and for the most part has replaced it. Mg is continuing to diverge from other MicroEmacs variants. Significant modifications would me require to adapt code from either the 3.x strains or v30. Command functions and key mapping, for instance, are completely different. This is the third distribution release of Mg. (It went through four beta releases to iron out the changes made by the various authors.) Prior releases were known as MicroGnuEmacs 1a and MicroGnuEmacs 1b. Beyond the work of Dave Conroy, author of the original public domain v30, the current version contains the work of: blarson@ecla.usc.edu Bob Larson mic@emx.utexas.edu Mic Kaczmarczik mwm@violet.berkeley.edu Mike Meyer sandra@cs.utah.edu Sandra Loosemore mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu Michael Portuesi RCKG01M@CALSTATE.BITNET Stephen Walton hakanson@mist.cs.orst.edu Marion Hakanson People who have worked on previous versions of Mg: rtech!daveb@sun.com Dave Brower These systems are known to work in the current version: 4.2 & 4.3 BSD Unix, SunOs 3.2, Ultrix-32 System V OS9/68k VMS Amiga Primos Atari ST Ms-Dos support is planned, but did not get done in time for this release. (Jeff Siegal was the one doing it.) The Ms-Dos files will probably be distributed separately when it becomes available. Cpm/68k support was dropped due to compiler bugs. Eunice support was dropped because of lack of interest. Mg 1b does support those systems. One change to late to make it into mg.tex is readding bsmap-mode (only if BSMAP is #defined when compiling). This is a toggle that controls input mapping to exchange the ^H (backspace) and DEL characters. Like GNU emacs input keymaps, it is not displayed on the mode line and will cause them to be treated as each other for echoing. (With bsmap-mode enabled, DEL will echo ^H in the echo line.) How to Make a Mg --------------------------- On UNIX at least, it's easy. (Note that even on these systems you may want to change a compile time option.) If you have BSD UNIX, do: ln sys/bsd/Makefile . make For System V, do: ln sys/sysv/Makefile . make There are several other directories under sys: osk, vms, amiga, atari, prime. You should follow the directions contained therein to make one of those versions. For most systems (everything except the amiga, and atari currently), the termcap terminal definition is used. There is a readme file in the default subdirectory of the sys directory explaining what entries are used and how. (Termcap is a way to do display manipulation in a terminal independent manner.) Besides the normal startup file (usually .mg) terminal specific initialization files may be used. (For example, in .mg.vt100 you may want to (global-set-key "\e[A" 'previous-line) to have the up arrow key work.) Some changes made to make this version more like Gnu Emacs may break startup files. Gnu Emacs 18 has both backward-delete-char and delete-backward-char that apparently do the same thing. This version has only the latter because that is what is documented in my manual (version 17) and bound by Gnu Emacs to DEL. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Known limitations: Recursive bindings may cause help and key rebinding code to go into an infinite loop, aborting with a stack overflow. Overwrite mode does not work in macros. (Characters are inserted rather than overwriting.) Dired mode has some problems: Rename does not update the buffer. Doing a dired again will update the buffer (whether it needs it or not) and will lose any marks for deletion. .. and . are not recognized as special cases. On systems with 16 bit integers, the kill buffer cannot exceed 32767 bytes. New implementation oddities: insert and define-key are new commands corresponding to the mocklisp functions in Gnu Emacs. (Mg does not have non-command functions.) (Mg's insert will only insert one string.) The display wrap code does not work at all like that of GNU emacs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ If you have a change to make that you think should be incorporated into the next version of Mg, send it the mg-support mail list. Addresses are: mg-support%ais1@ecla.usc.edu {cit-vax,sdcrdcf,trwrb}!oberon!ais1!mg-support Support for additional systems and terminals should include being available for beta testing as other changes are made. (Send a short note to mg-support.) Currently, beta test copies of Mg are made available via Internet ftp, so beta testers need access to the Internet. (UUCP sites that are customers of uunet can get it via them. Contact uunet!uunet-request for details.) If you can't reach one of us via a computer network, I suppose you could send a change to my snail mail address below on 5" os9 format disks or 9 track tape (ANSI variable label or Prime magsav format), but this effectively rules you out as a potential beta tester. (Don't expect the disk or tape back unless you include a SASE with sufficient postage.) I will not be sending out copies on magnetic media, so please don't ask. If you somehow got an incomplete or non-standard copy, (i.e. missing one of the sys directories mentioned here as working) complain to who you got it from not to me. Robert Larson 309 S. Alexandria Ave. Apt. 117 Los Angeles, CA 90020 Alternatively, and under the same conditions, you can send either a 3" AmigaDOS format disk or a 9 track tape (Unix tar format) to: Mike Meyer P.O. Box 4730 Berkeley, CA 94704