
Epsilon Programmer's Editor - valera_rozuvan
http://www.lugaru.com/
======
massysett
The GNU Emacs website does a better sales job...which is interesting because
unlike this product, GNU does not even need to sell anything. When looking
through the website I see Windows 95-ish screenshots, pages that say they have
not been updated in over five years, and little description of what it does
beyond saying it's like EMACS. No clue at all about why I should use this
rather than one of the other free-beer editors out there. And now I read these
comments and see it costs $250? Why??

~~~
notalaser
> little description of what it does beyond saying it's like EMACS.

If you'd bother to read, instead of expecting a virtual salesman to spoonfeed
you make-believe thrash, you'd notice that a summary of "what it does" (
[http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html](http://www.lugaru.com/epsinfo.html) ) and
_the damn manual_ , where you can find _everything_ it does, not just "a
little description" (
[http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html](http://www.lugaru.com/pdf.html) ,
[http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon-manual.html](http://www.lugaru.com/epsilon-
manual.html) ), are linked right on the frontpage.

~~~
janoc
Sorry, but that's just nonsense. If you want to actually sell something, I
would expect to have at least a summary of main selling points right there, at
the front page.

Expecting the potential buyer to dig through the manual to even learn what the
software actually is beyond the "emacs like editor" is ridiculous. For me it
just means it is yet another editor for obscure OSes (OS/2 ?), one of
thousands on the market, and that I am not going to consider spending money on
it when the authors can't be even bothered to tell me why should I do so. The
product could be technically superior than everything else and the best thing
since sliced bread, but it means little if you don't tell people about it.
That's marketing 101.

Compare with e.g. SublimeText website - the key stuff is right there, even
animated (!): [https://www.sublimetext.com/](https://www.sublimetext.com/)

Or Atom: [https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

Or even Emacs:
[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/)

Even Vim's web site starts with a short summary:
[http://www.vim.org/](http://www.vim.org/)

Unfortunately, many project websites (both open source and commercial) are
like that - front page filled with jargon and random stuff but you won't find
a short paragraph summarizing what the software actually is for and its main
features for people not already familiar with it.

~~~
notalaser
> If you want to actually sell something

Perhaps its authors want to achieve other objectives than just sell something,
or think it's more appropriate for their users and target public.

There's certainly the possibility that they aren't really sure how selling
things on the Internet works. However, I'm willing to entertain the
possibility that the guys who've been selling this for 32 years know what
works for them better than someone who just found out about their editor.

And frankly, design aside, I like Epsilon's website a lot more than
SublimeText's. The front page doesn't offer any useful information about the
"key stuff" for a programmer's editor (is it _properly_ extensible, through an
extension language? is it easy to interface with other programs? maybe has
some added goodies, like a hex editing mode?).

Besides, it's entirely devoid of any useful information besides these 7
features and 6 animations. There seems to be no way for me to find out if ST
has any features for e.g. remote editing or VCS integration other than
downloading the evaluation version. Where's the manual? Where's at least a
longer list of supported features?

I equally don't understand the fixation for animation. It takes less time to
find the Epsilon manual on their website and skim it than it takes to watch
the six (confusing, since there's no on-screen keyboard!) animations that take
up the whole screen. I understand its value as an enhanced form of
illustration, but I'd appreciate it more if it would _enhance_ the written,
precise information, rather than replace it.

~~~
rbanffy
> or think it's more appropriate for their users and target public.

I wonder who would that be. Mind you, programmers who shop for an editor are
usually very knowledgeable about what they want. They know how to extend
Eclipse or Emacs or Atom or VS Code or whatever they have ever laid their
hands on.

------
rcb
I'm a 20+ year daily gnu/x emacs user and purchased a copy of Epsilon in July
after demoing it for a couple weeks. Since then I've been coding in Epsilon
daily (Linux/C++):

What I love about it: 1) it's VERY fast, 2) the documentation is phenomenal,
3) the defaults are sane, and the configurable options are well thought out,
4) rock-solid stable.

It's a beautiful piece of software and I've really enjoyed using it. No
regrets on the purchase. To me it was worth the $250.

------
jupiter2
For some reason, I find it gratifying that this operation has been in business
(more or less) for 32 years.

I can feel a strong sense of pride in the application he's built and still
seeing it out there. Whatever few orders he gets is essentially keeping the
site running and providing online support to those few still using his wares.

Each order gets you copies for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OS/2 and DOS
versions. Must be fun to have a long-standing project that you can go to that
keeps you in touch with both newer and older OSes too.

------
notJim
The order form has this line "Note: As of 19 February 2016, CDs are
temporarily out of stock. If you need a CD please email us for estimated
availability.", which might imply that someone bought themselves a CD copy of
this editor back in February.

------
tonyle
Sometimes programmers need to look at unusual files: binary files, very big
files, odd data files. Epsilon was designed without the limits of other
editors, so it can handle these kinds of jobs, as well as ordinary files. For
example, with Epsilon, lines can be as long as you like.

This text editor gets it. Such a contrast to some of the editors we have today
where anything over a few megabytes is an edge case not worth fixing.

~~~
PeCaN
Really? I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM. (At least
it worked though, _cough_ Atom _cough_.) And more importantly it has _no_
unicode support whatsoever as far as I can tell (any non-ASCII characters I
typed showed up as ?).

~~~
ComodoHacker
> I loaded a 1.2GB ISO in the demo and it used… 1.2GB of RAM.

And what you expect here? Other editors usually take 2x to 3x of file size.

~~~
nightcracker
mmap'd files.

~~~
ComodoHacker
mmap doesn't help much if you do syntax highlighting or other formatting.

------
qwertyuiop924
I'll stick with Emacs for now. $250 is a bit heavy for those of us with little
disposable income.

In addition, I fail to see the advantage of this over Emacs: Emacs already has
pretty much all of Epsilon's features, and a larger community. Furthermore, I
highly doubt that its extensibility features are as extensive.

It's kinda cool, though.

Sidenote: why do I always see the HN headlines up to a day ahead in the
previous headlines? Is this just thing everybody sees? Or am I just really
lucky picking my threads?

~~~
ww520
Epsilon is very fast, like coming up in a second. Emacs takes tens of seconds
up to a minute. You start Emacs and hope to never shut it down. With epsilon
you can start it on a file quickly and move on.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Emacs takes tens of seconds up to a minute._

I need to seriously rethink my Emacs configuration. I thought I had _a lot_ of
packages and elisp scripts loaded at startup, but I don't think I ever hit the
5-second mark. Emacs starting up a _whole minute_? What great packages am I
missing?

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Me neither, and you'll most often run through emacsclient anyways, so...

------
drfuchs
In Epsilon 2.0 (1985) for MS-DOS, you could Cntl-X Cntl-M to get a buffer that
had a real, live shell in it, where you could start up background compiles and
such, and still be able to edit your other buffers live. This was a miracle!
(DOS could barely run a single process, with certainly no preemptive
scheduling; and even if you dreamed of multi-tasking, there was a maximum of
640k of memory, with nothing virtual about it).

------
kragen
I think "ϵpsilon" was my first programmer's editor, although I think I had
previously written programs in EDT, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, QBASIC, GW-BASIC,
ZBASIC, IBM Basic, Applesoft Basic, WordStar, and a thing called Video Scribe
for HDOS. It was _so much_ better than nearly all of the alternatives, even
though I didn't use its IDE features.

It was super helpful to me to have used ϵpsilon when I got my first Unix
account in 1993, because I already knew how to use Emacs, almost. Some of the
basic keybindings (like exiting and changing windows) were different enough to
be an obstacle.

And then I never looked back. From then on I used my 286 to run Procomm+ and
Vernon Buerg's LIST.COM, not to write programs on. Sorry, ϵpsilon. Emacs is an
entire universe.

(Since then I've also programmed in vim, IDEA, Eclipse, some prototype editors
I've written, Arduino, XCode, Notepad, OpenSCAD, and browsers, mostly in order
to collaborate with other people and occasionally because they are better
integrated with one or another more or less shitty system than Emacs is. But
Emacs is pretty much the most convenient way to program for me.)

------
mcphage
Still being sold for $250 != still being bought for $250, as a lot of people
who try selling things on eBay find out to their dismay.

~~~
dietrichepp
Our volume is zero, but we make up for it with large margins.

------
stevefeinstein
Been using Epsilon daily since 1989. I've been disillusioned lately that it's
not been updated for quite some time. The developer is still quite responsive
though, and even though I use it less than I used to, I still use it every
day. I was hoping to see a native Mac version rather than the version that
depends on X.

~~~
kabdib
+1 for better Mac support. I don't know if the author has any inclination to
do an update, but I would definitely re-buy the editor if the Mac version
didn't depend on X.

------
raarts
I used epsilon for all my programming work until I discovered vi in '93\. It
ran on dos, and OS/2\. United had something similar in uemacs. I used EEL the
extension language to write a log of all I did to help refreshing my memory
when I filled by time sheet. It was a great editor with a built in shell,
windowing and whatnot. Both on DOS and OS/2 I ran the MKS Toolkit to emulate a
Unix environment and it fit right in. Happy user. No idea it was still on
sale.

------
xvilka
I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project.

They listed 3 main advantages:

"The first immediate advantage is that Elisp will execute faster, because
Guile uses a compiler tower with many optimization passes and ultimately
compiles to Guile VM bytecode, which is more efficient than current Elisp
bytecode. In the future, Guile is likely to implement some forms of native JIT
as well as AOT compilation as well.

A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional
language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are capable
of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact rational
numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved defstruct),
CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module system, hygienic
macros, multiple-value returns, and threads.

A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp
code, no matter what language they’re implemented in, because different
languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if they’re
both a Lisp. C-implemented functions (“subrs” in Elisp terminology), Elisp
functions, Scheme procedures, etc. all compile to the same “procedure” data
type, which may appear in Elisp symbols’ function-slots, be bound to Scheme
variables, and are otherwise first-class objects in both environments which
can be funcalled or applied explicitly or by the language’s normal syntactic
way of calling functions. Similarly, other data types are unified between the
languages; Elisp integers and exact Scheme integers, inexact Scheme numbers
and Elisp floats, Elisp cons cells and Scheme pairs, symbols, etc. are the
same data type across the languages. (Strings are an exception though; see
below.) Therefore one can generally use a library written in another language
as if it were written in the same language."

And looks like there is some progress still: [2]

Here is the current TODO list [3], if someone wants to help.

[1]
[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs)

[2] [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-
devel/2016-03/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-
devel/2016-03/msg00028.html)

[3]
[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo)

~~~
wtbob
> I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project.

I really _really_ hope they don't and use Common Lisp to achieve the same end.
Running emacs in a Common Lisp like SBCL implementation means that it will be
natively compiled, with an _extremely_ intelligent compiler.

> A second advantage is that it will be easier to implement some additional
> language features for Elisp which the Guile compiler tower and VM are
> capable of, like a full numeric tower (infinite-sized integers, exact
> rational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc.), record types (like an improved
> defstruct), CLOS-like OOP, an FFI, composable continuations, a module
> system, hygienic macros, multiple-value returns, and threads.

Common Lisp has infinite-sized integers, exact rational numbers and imaginary
numbers. It has DEFSTRUCT. It has CLOS (obviously). Every Unix Lisp I'm aware
of has an FFI. Continuations are actually a problem when it comes to e.g.
UNWIND-PROTECT. Common Lisp has packages and an excellent module system in
ASDF3. It has hygienic macro libraries, and natively supports the more-
powerful DEFMACRO. It supports multiple-value returns. BORDEAUX-THREADS is an
excellent portable thread library.

> A third advantage is all Guile APIs/libraries becoming available to Elisp
> code, no matter what language they’re implemented in, because different
> languages on the Guile VM can inter-operate quite well, especially if
> they’re both a Lisp.

Common Lisp has many excellent libraries available via Quicklisp.

Scheme is IMHO a broken language: distinguishing NIL and #f; only have one
namespace; continuations; not allowing (cdr nil); not having a native object
system; not having a rich type and class library; not having read macros. It
was an interesting experiment, but the effort spent on Schemes would have been
better spent improving Lisp.

Lisp is far closer to elisp, and is a better language to boot.

~~~
jpfr
The idea of GuileEmacs is not to move away from the elisp language. The idea
is to use an elisp implementation based on the Guile virtual machine.

Elisp will not go away. So any arguments for lisp and against scheme are void
in this context.

~~~
wtbob
> The idea of GuileEmacs is not to move away from the elisp language. The idea
> is to use an elisp implementation based on the Guile virtual machine.

> Elisp will not go away. So any arguments for lisp and against scheme are
> void in this context.

If the goal is not to mingle elisp & Scheme, then what's the point of using
the Guile VM? Why not just implement an interpreter for elisp in Lisp?

There is absolutely no reason to mingle Scheme with elisp. Scheme's not a bad
language for those places it's well-suited, but production software is not one
of those places. For that there is Common Lisp.

------
kelvin0
Lugaru is from the french word 'Loup-Garou' which means Werewolf. I wonder
where he got the idea to name the software company as such? Also it speaks
volumes that no one has yet commented on appearance of the website, I guess
the target audience is not the 'get the latest hip named thing' kinda crowd.

~~~
pschastain
From the site ([http://www.lugaru.com/why-
lugaru.html](http://www.lugaru.com/why-lugaru.html)):

'Sometimes people ask what our company name, Lugaru, means. It's actually a
phonetic spelling of the French word for werewolf, "loup-garou". One day in
1984, after finally turning off the computers and noticing the sun had come
up, we decided this might be an appropriate name for our new company.'

------
zoom6628
Very happy to see someone keep an editor going as a commercial product for so
many years. I think this is a good example of 'craft'. There are a few gems
out there that once you stumble over them, they become part of your toolbox
and are just so much better than anything else for the work that you do, that
you stick with them. This looks to me to be an example of that.

Not all IDEs suit all people. Apart from feature set one also has to consider
style and operations. Im most happy when i find the features+style+operations
match to the job at hand. And that is why i turn to Notepad++ when i have to
ferret around in files of different types, awk when i have to mess with
text/log files. I turn to VS only when i have to code something in C#, use
PyCharm for python things.

Bottom line when an IDE 'just clicks' for you then its a wonderfully
productive tool.

------
azeirah
Because of all the positive comments I decided to try the editor. For all of
you evangalizing this editor, why do keybindings like "F9, Ctrl-X U" make
sense for common tasks like undo?

Press F9, release and then quickly press ctrl-x, release and then press u.
Even during my short time with emacs did I not hurt my fingers this much

~~~
thaumasiotes
Just to point out, the binding for undo in emacs is C-X u.

~~~
lgas
Actually, the primary binding is 'C-/', with 'C-x u' and 'C-_' as alaises. The
'C-x u' alias exists because it's easier for new users to remember and the
'C-_' alias exists because that's what some terminals send when you press
'C-/'.

~~~
handojin
cough M-x cua-mode cough...

~~~
throwanem
Makes a good set of training wheels, sure. I used it for a couple of years.

I did end up with undo still on C-z after turning off cua-mode, because I use
graphical frames and never want to suspend anyway. But it's not really a help:
the C-/ C-? pair is much more convenient, and for nontrivial undoing I'm
navigating a state tree anyway.

------
zeveb
I almost want to buy a copy just to give the guy kudos for keeping with it for
all these years. Pretty impressive array of platforms and features for
something with that old a history!

------
andyhnj
I've heard of Epsilon, but never used it.

Back in the days when I actually paid for text editors, my favorite was Multi-
Edit ([http://multieditsoftware.com/](http://multieditsoftware.com/)). I
remember UltraEdit ([http://www.ultraedit.com/](http://www.ultraedit.com/))
being pretty popular too.

Nowadays, whatever work I'm not doing in Visual Studio is being done in
Notepad++.

~~~
mwfunk
Speaking of bygone editors, I still have (very) fond memories of using QEdit
(later TSE (The Semware Editor)) in my DOS-centric early '90s larval hacking
days.

Looks like they still sell it for $45 a pop, I don't think the website
([http://www.semware.com](http://www.semware.com)) has changed much in the
intervening 20 years though. :)

------
kabdib
I've been using Epsilon for 25+ years. It's great, and well worth the money I
have spent on the updates over the past few decades. It's my go-to editor. I
can get along in vanilla Emacs, but Epsilon is a lot friendlier on a Windows
box.

There's not much I would change on the Windows version (better multiple
monitor support might be interesting0. I _would_ pay dear money for better
MacOS support.

~~~
robobro
Yeah, it looks way better than vanilla emacs on the Windows version.

------
KirinDave
The OSX deployment not being a "verified developer" shuts down anyone in an
enterprise environment. That's too bad, I wanted to try it at work.

~~~
kragen
That's interesting, and fairly dystopian — you're not allowed to run any
software on your computer that isn't signed by Apple? Can you install, say,
VirtualBox?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Leaving aside the "signed by Apple" angle, I find it ironic in modern
companies that many of them spend a lot of money finding people to work for
them, then they spend money paying those people, and then they spend _more_
money making it as hard as humanly possible for those people to do their jobs.

------
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u
(Perhaps a bit off-topic) Another non-free editor that's been around for a
while is BBEdit. It's always been Mac-only, unfortunately.

------
klodolph
How many licenses are still being sold? I see that the last update was in May
2006.

~~~
vonmoltke
> 4 August 2016 New Evaluation Version of Epsilon 13.12 Available.

> 19 September 2011 Epsilon 13.12 update available, compatible with OS X 10.7
> Lion.

Those aren't updates?

~~~
stevefeinstein
Not really. They put an eval version up which expires. They then upload a new
build that pushes the expiration out. Repeat every few months.

------
statictype
I love how there is a prominent link explaining Year 2000 issues.

------
sctb
We changed the title from “A mighty editor still being sold after 30 years for
$250”, which breaks the HN guidelines for editorializing.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
smacktoward
And now the headline provides absolutely no indication of why it's an
interesting link. Sigh.

Why not just strike "mighty" and leave it as "An editor still being sold after
30 years for $250"?

~~~
sctb
From the guidelines:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
> linkbait.

The long-standing policy is to represent the submitted content as accurately
as possible and let readers pick out what's interesting to them, not what the
submitter found interesting. The comment thread is the place to express one's
opinion on the content.

------
PeCaN
Its extension language looks very interesting. It looks very powerful while
having domain-specific features (I've noticed ‘user’, ‘command’, and
‘save_var’ keywords). See e.g.
[http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e](http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/cmake.e)
[http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e](http://www.lugaru.com/ftp/for-v13/lispmode.e)

Also, the demo is extremely snappy. Shame it doesn't seem to have vi emulation
(unless I missed it?) or org-mode, both of which are killer features of emacs
for me.

~~~
zem
as text editor extension languages go, i really liked aurora's [old dos-era
editor with an emacs-like core + soft layer architecture]. it was pascal-like,
and really pleasant to work with.

[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html](http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~knassen/amacs.html)

------
rbryan13
Epsilon is great. Let me offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It's a secret
weapon, an unfair advantage we have, those of us in the know.

I was so happy to come upon it as a sadly ex-Symbolics-ZMacs user (and ex-MIT-
TECO-Emacs user) when first confronted with a 286 system, and I have have been
using it ever since. I buy a few copies every few years, typically for team
members who wonder what's that magic I keep using. At my present company, I
fought (and won) a three-month battle with the Software Standards Committee to
be allowed to install it.

As a Windows developer I routinely do all editing in Epsilon, switching to
Visual Studio only to compile and debug. To draft this very message, I
switched away from my web browser to Epsilon. Steven Doerfler provides great
customer service on the very rare occasion that I need to turn to him.

If you have any emacs in your soul, buy Epsilon. Now.

~~~
PeCaN
Why do you prefer it over regular Emacs? How is it better enough to make up
for the much larger collection of extensions for Emacs?

The demo for me just felt like a snappier Emacs clone.

~~~
rbryan13
Well, the first N specific things that come to mind have already been
expressed pretty well by previous comments here (including your own
"snappier"). The next 10*N things are already expressed pretty well in the
2009-format-but-still-valid-content marketroid material on lugaru.com. As it
happens, I haven't found a need to explore a universe of community extensions
because right out of the "box" Epsilon does nearly everything I need, and my
few personal extensions take care of the rest. Beyond that, I no longer care
to engage in yet another emacs religious war, and emacs does not need any bad-
mouthing from me.

~~~
Elrac
I can understand and respect that you're reluctant to write an endorsement of
Epsilon and/or a comparison with Emacs. But I'd like to let you know that
while starting to read your comment I was looking forward to just that, and
now find myself a bit disappointed that you're not sharing some reasons for
your enthusiasm.

I was a big fan of Epsilon back in the days when it was an alternative to
WordStar and I think I still own an original (paid) copy on floppy disks, but
I'm not familiar enough (any more) with its feature set to meaningfully answer
the question of what qualifies it above Emacs.

Personally, I'm considering paying $250 just for the nostalgia value. And I
love fast editors with an uncluttered surface. The ability to edit arbitrarily
long lines and binaries is certainly a plus. But I would appreciate, if you'd
reconsider, hearing more arguments to knock me off the fence.

