
Ask HN: Why does XEmacs still exist? - snoopybbt
I mean, I could not get what the difference are between GNU Emacs and XEmacs.<p>Please enlighten me.
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cjbprime
XEmacs had things (multiple terminals attached at once, internationalization,
color themes, input methods, and so on) long before (like a decade before) GNU
Emacs had them.

But now GNU Emacs has them, so the only people still using XEmacs are
approximately the people who got set up on it 20 years ago and don't feel like
changing.

It still exists because things don't pop out of existence when their main
reasons for having been created long ago go away.

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ScottBurson
I've used XEmacs all day every day ever since it was Lucid Emacs. I probably
could switch to GNU Emacs if I really wanted, but I'm used to XEmacs, and I
have a lot of personal customizations that would have to be changed. I don't
really know how hard that would be, but I'm very glad that XEmacs continues to
be maintained nonetheless.

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fdesmet
Having used XEmacs for a very long time, I recently tried switching to GNU
Emacs just to gain access to one particular Emacs-only feature that seemed
supremely useful to me. I spent a couple of days hacking my .emacs file to get
GNU Emacs configured more less the same as my XEmacs config, but even then
things weren't quite the same. In the end, the "one feature" proved not to be
as useful as I thought it would be, and I went back to XEmacs. Reason: call it
a combination of my old habits and the silly but nigglingly painful
differences between the two.

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lispm
[http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html](http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html)

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Ologn
[http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html)

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smacktoward
This explains why XEmacs _came into existence_ , not what compelling reasons
there are to use it over GNU Emacs in 2014, which was the original question.

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RickHull
The original question is why it still exists. The answer is simply that XEmacs
still has users. I would guess that only the tiniest sliver are "new" users.
Some of the existing users are surely developers who continue to maintain the
project, which at this point should only be of historical interest to
potential new emacs users.

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eloisant
In short, people disagreed on small stuff and forked because they could no
longer work together. So there's some minor differences between the two.

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na85
Are there usage statistics showing which is more popular? I've never even
heard of XEmacs until just now.

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muuh-gnu
The same way you could ask why GNU Emacs still exists. Because there are
people who for various tiny (rational or irrational) reasons dont want to
switch the editor they've been using the last 20 years.

It is the same thing as asking why German is still used, now that English is a
world language.

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readme
I'm pretty sure there are still new users adopting GNU Emacs as their text
editor.

