[Simh] [Announce] Emacs 21.2 for VMS/VAX

[Ken Cornetet]

For many years, MicroEmacs was my favorite editor, and I still fire up the windows version on occasion when I need to do some complicated substitutions on text.

Sadly, Dan Lawrence, the author of MicroEmacs 4 passed away several years ago. No one picked up support for his version. MicroEmacs 3.8 was forked by an outfit called jasspa. It was improved and the license changed to GPL. I don't see VMS listed as supported, though.

As far a MicroEmacs not being good for coding, interesting bit of trivia: MicroEmacs was the only editor on Linus Torvalds' systems for a long time.

-----Original Message-----
From: Simh [mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of lists at openmailbox.org
Sent: Monday, February 1, 2016 2:52 AM
To: simh at trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] [Announce] Emacs 21.2 for VMS/VAX

Hopefully the following information will be of some interest and value to people running VMS/VAX on SIMH.

Because of keyboard issues I found the native VMS editors to be difficult to use. I have been using Emacs for a long time on other platforms so I went looking for a copy to run on VMS/VAX but couldn't find a binary. I don't have the skills or tools to build Emacs from source on VMS/VAX.

I have been using MicroEmacs 4.0 which is stable and runs very well on a low spec SIMH host. However the features are minimal bordering on spartan.
It's not a very good editor for coding and seems to be relatively unsupported although old builds are available for VMS/VAX. An appeal for help on the post-fork MicroEmacs mailing list yielded thundering silence.

I brought up the issue on comp.os.mvs and one of the guys spent some time getting gnu Emacs 21.2 working. There were a few problems initially but he seems to have gotten it working. The performance on a low spec SIMH host is unacceptable but on a reasonably modern PC it works great.

With the permission of the developer who built and got it working, I am reposting the info from comp.os.vms here. Many thanks to hb <end.of at inter.net> for his generosity in making this available.

Any issues, discussion, etc. please follow up to comp.os.vms on usenet.

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I uploaded emacs21_2_vax.zip to https://www.sendspace.com/file/byw8z7.
Feel free to announce it on any other mailing list and/or copy the zip archive to a VMS specific archive/repository.

--- 8< ---

This is the readme file of the emacs kit for VAX: emacs21_2_vax.zip.

GNU Emacs 21.2 for VAX/VMS

Contents of emacs21_2_vax.zip:

emacs21_2_vax.txt - this file
emacs-vax-bin.txt - how to use the binary kit emacs-vax-build.txt - how to build emacs from the sources emacs21_2_vax_bin.zip - the binary kit emacs21_2_vax_src.zip - VAX specific files for building emacs

The binary kit was built on V7.3 without support for TCPIP and X11:
$ @[-.emacs212_3]configure --with-tcpip=NO --with-x=NO --WITH-X-TOOLKIT=NO -
        --prefix=bld_root:[LOCAL] --startupdir=bld_root:[LOCAL.STARTUP]

Building for any other configuration may require additional source code changes. The supplied VAX specific sources are not intended to be compiled on other VMS platforms. Some of the files may be seen as hacks to get emacs running on VAX/VMS. The base source code for emacs is not included in this kit. The base source code is a VMS version based on emacs version 21.2. The source code can be found on the OpenVMS freeware CD version V8.0: emacs/emacs21_2.zip. These sources are for building emacs for Alpha. This zip archive contains temporary files, which are not required for the build, as well as an Alpha executable image.
Unfortunately these sources were not found in the emacs git repository on savannah.gnu.org.

Please note, officially the support for VMS was removed in Emacs 23.
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