(Note: If you are reading this on Github, you can find the original Fossil repository here).
This is an enhanced version of the MicroEMACS that was originally posted by Dave Conroy to USENET in 1986. It predates the very popular Daniel Lawrence version of MicroEMACS, which is much larger.
I have added support for many new features over the years:
- etags
- cscope
- ispell
- undo
- UTF-8
- regular expression search and replace
- optional PCRE2 (Perl-compatible regular expressions)
- extensions written in Ruby
MicroEMACS, unlike every other text editor in the known universe, does not support syntax highlighting. I investigated this possibility, but rejected the idea, due to additional code complexity and my lack of enthusiasm or burning need for this popular crutch. See here for a discussion of the case against syntax highlighting.
In the past I ported MicroEMACS to numerous operating systems, but currently this source tree supports only Linux, Android (using termux), OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Windows (using MinGW). I seem to have lost the source for the MS-DOS and OS/2 versions, but they are unlikely to be useful in the future.
MicroEMACS is still very "micro", even with all the new features I've added. Back in the 80s, as a 16-bit MS-DOS executable, it contained about 57K of code. Now, as a 64-bit Linux executable with all of the new features mentioned above, it contains about 110K of code. By comparison, vim-tiny contains about 1.4MB of code, and nano contains about 262K of code.
To build a non-debug version with no Ruby support on Linux, Android (termux), FreeBSD, or Windows with MinGW or Cygwin:
mkdir obj
cd obj
../configure
make # gmake on FreeBSD or OpenBSD
Dave Conroy released his source code into the public domain. I have changed my version to use the GNU General Public License Version 3.
There is a web version of the MicroEMACS manual here. If you are viewing this README in a Fossil repository, click on the Docs link above (or click here) to view the manual.
To clone this repository:
fossil clone https://www.bloovis.com/fossil/home/marka/fossils/pe
--Mark Alexander ([email protected])