VMS utilities (command line editing)

[jim frost]

>In UniPress Emacs
>(which is available as an option from SGI) these windows behave just like
>a dumb terminal (erase, kill, etc. work) except that you can recall
>and edit previous command lines, and all sorts of other things.
>GnuEmacs probably does this too, or can be hacked to do so.
>And you can use the arrow keys, too :-).

It's not a bad idea to think of GNU Emacs as a substantial superset of
UniPress, especially considering the number of outside contributors
who have added functionality.  GNU does support sub-shells, vt100
terminal emulation in a window, lisp shells (as well as its own
interactive lisp), etc.  And hanoi to nine levels if you're bored.

What are the downsides of using Emacs as a shell?  Emacs strips out a
lot of control sequences which are necessary to many programs.  You
can run things without the emacs window but it doesn't quite work like
a shell.  This could be hacked pretty easily though.  Emacs,
especially GNU Emacs, is also extremely memory-hungry.  There are
installations I know of which refuse to allow any emacs or emacs-like
editor on their system because of resource usage.  But most of them
also believe that VMS is reality so it might just be a mindset.
Personally I only use emacs as an editor/compile environment which it
is particularly well-suited for.

A feature-for-feature comparison of GNU emacs versus any other editor
is rather interesting, but most other editors are not completely
extensible or have as many programmers actively creating newer,
funkier additions to it.

Speaking of GNU, and more in keeping with the info-iris theme, the
recent posting to get GNU Emacs running on the 4D's didn't configure
Emacs to believe in job control which the 4D's now support and which
Emacs happily handles.  If you don't want to figure out how to enable
it you can talk to spike at bu-it.bu.edu who can tell you.

Happy hacking,

jim frost
madd at bu-it.bu.edu