[This is an edited version of the original mg README, updated slightly to reflect changes in the last 20 years.] 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. 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". 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. 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 Currently maintained in the OpenBSD src tree, with contributions from many others. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.