qemacs

qemacs is a strange one, it is a great editor which unfortunately suffers from a genuinely appalling build system and an apparent lack of exposure.

Wow, if I'm going to start like that surely I can't have anything good to say about it? Quite the opposite actually, it is that useful you can look past the massive problems and still get your work done. The only two distributions I've seen that carry qemacs just accentuate the problem, and lead the users in to missing some of the cool features.

Top of the list is its unmaintained status, always a problem ;) Second on the list is the upstream and Debian packages cause users to miss out on the wonderful world of plugins by failing to install headers making compilation of plugins a chore at best. Then there are some annoyances like the help system being generally useless, and having to fix the texinfo doc so you have a valid input to make an info file from(whatever you think about info docs they are better than the output of an info to HTML convertor).

So what does it do? Firstly, and most importantly, in my opinion it is a healthy little emacs clone. Second it is the closest thing to a WYSIWYG editor I would ever want to use, some degree of WYSIWYG with a real editing backend. Hmm, I've only made two good points and I'm all out, yet this is the amazing thing about qemacs the two good points are done so well it makes up for everything else as far as I'm concerned.

I'm going to quote an old entry(which has long since vanished) I wrote about qemacs here, because it states everything else that I want to say... So here goes:

I was looking for a small emacs clone I could use on a boot cd, because I'm a huge emacs fan, and I came across qemacs pretty much by accident but boy what a lucky accident it was.

You see qemacs is a small, and compatible, emacs clone. Small as in 230 kB, which is small enough(it could be even smaller if I didn't want certain features). It is emacs-a-like enough for me, in as much as it features all the standard key bindings I use. It also features an impressive plugin system, impressive because of simplicity.

I would have perhaps liked a more lisp like configuration file, but it is hard to moan at the C-like config file format. set_display_size(80,50); is a simple enough way to set the display size. And this comment is the only downside I've found, and I can easily live with it.

Note: I do actually consider the lack of transparency a small downside, but I can fix that myself in a few minutes if it becomes too annoying because the source is available.

So, already it fits my needs and suprisingly well but can you imagine my delight when I found out it has an absolutely fantastic docbook mode. This is almost the WYSIWYG docbook editor I've also wanted(and I wasn't even looking).

So all I can say is thanks to Fabrice Bellard for a wonderful tool, and tell you to take a look at qemacs if you are looking for a small emacs clone or a really cool WYSIWYG way to edit docbook.

It should probably be mentioned that because of the online help system problems you might find qemacs quite hard to use if you aren't already an emacs or emacs clone user.