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Aucb.493 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Fri Feb 19 10:59:18 1982 EMACS on a VAX >From RWK@SCRC-TENEX@MIT-AI Fri Feb 19 10:51:51 1982 Date: 17 Feb 1982 1641-PST From: Stephen Hansen <ICL.HANSEN AT SU-SCORE> Subject: EMACS on a VAX To: editor-people at SU-SCORE

I will be doing a large amount of work on a VAX running VMS and am rather disappointed with the editors normally available on the system. I wonder if any of you know of a version of EMACS or any other reasonable screen editor that will run on VMS. Running Eunice or otherwise putting a UNIX shell on top of the VMS system is not possible for this system so the editor would have to be compatable with the standard VMS system. Any help or information that you can give me would be appreciated.

I am at a loss to guess why you view an EMACS using Eunice as being incompatible with a standard VMS system! It doesn't castrate your VMS, EMACS is just a .EXE file. It is a completely separate program from the unix shell which Eunice also provides. The *ONLY* two things from Eunice that you need to run EMACS are the subroutine libraries (these simulate the Unix system calls and such) and the termcap terminal database. In fact, the systems I've used with EMACS have had no part of EUNICE at all except for what was linked in with EMACS and the TERMCAP database.

There is a much more severe problem to be faced. James Gosling at CMU (the author of VAX EMACS) doesn't want it freely distributed. Basicly, he'd like recompense for his labors on EMACS, which is a very reasonable position. However, he currently has no mechanism for licensing. If you are a non-commercial site he might be willing to give you permission to use it, you can ask him. I believe the EUNICE licensing is very straightforward.

I've used this at MIT on VMS with Dave Kashtan's enhancements and it makes a big difference in VMS's usability, especially since you can run VMS DCL commands directly from EMACS with the output going to an EMACS buffer.

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