Re: A femtolisp based emacs clone

[edu500ac@gmail.com]

Hi Rusi.

I don't want to improve on gnu-emacs. It is my favorite editor, and I think that it has every feature that one may need in a text editor. 

The main goal of the femtoemacs project is to provide a tiny emacs clone, for opening small text files with minimum start up. Well, there are small clones that are used to fulfill this niche. To name a few: Zile, jmacs, microEmacs, etc. By the way, femtoemacs is based in one of these clones, to wit, atto and Anthony's editor. What I miss in these clones is the possibility of extending them in Lisp. This is my favorite feature in Emacs. Therefore, femtolisp is a tiny Emacs that one can customize in Lisp. It is a replacement for Zile, jmacs ou microEmacs, not for Emacs. 

In many situations, I need a small editor for a mobile computer or for a cloud computer. It would be great if I had emacs in such a situations, but emacs is large big and difficult to install for this kind of applications. I could use jmacs or Zile in my cloud computer, but in doing so I would give up Lisp customization. With femtoemacs, I will keep lisp scripting. To make a long story short, if you feel the need of using jmacs or microEmacs, then femtoemacs may be a good replacement for these editors, since you can customize it in femtolisp or scheme.

As for femtolisp, it was developed by Jeff Bezanson, the same person that created the Julia language. It is one of the fastest interpreters around, and can be made fully compatible with Scheme.