The Sinclair QL Forum

Albeit I always liked DME (also programmable), the QL version of

MicroEMACS

is a dream!

Thank you Thierry Godefroy!

It's a very current version (4.x, most Windows versions are 3.x). There are some quirks as with all EMACS but this can be fixed thanks to EMACs builtin programming language (kind of LISP).

BTW: I don't think the Micro in MicroEMACS comes from its limited capabilities (compared to EMACS), but because it was (one of) the first version which also runs on micro computers (EMACS and its predecessors first only run on mini computers, like PDP-11, Vax, ...). MicroEMACS has most of the features of a real EMACS.

And the QL version is GREAT! The GUI Thierry wrote for it (QL Extended Environment GUI) is superb! It has even a Copy/Paste to/from Scrap which on QPC2 is also working with the clipboard of Windows :-))))))

p.s.: One thing which is annoying is, that you cannot close the current visible document (buffer in EMACS spoke). You must first switch to another buffer, before you can KILL (^X-K) the buffer. I think I must write an extension...

p.p.s.: ^-G <CTRL-G> always aborts the current command in the command line. A VERY IMPORTANT SHORTCUT if you don't know what's going on...

Back in my QHJ publishing days, I used MicroEmacs for creating the newsletter. It was portable in that MicroEmacs (3.X) on the QL ran similarly to 3.X on MS-DOS and the text files were quite portable. The syntax highlighting on 4.X is a nice feature for SuperBasic or C programming. MicroEmacs also has word wrap capability, so it is almost like a word processor. For doing bold or and larger fonts (Deskjet 500 printer) I wrote my own simple version of roff, to print out the QHJ.

Tim

Hi,

QHJ was an excellent emag, I stil read now, all still relavent.

I likd MicroEmacs, a very good programmable editor thauses the Extended Environment, has colour keyword modes. But it does allow access to thd Thing system and excuting S*BASIC, no help on keywords...

Which is where QD comes in, with a Thing to run the S*BASIC programme in the editor, directly. The Qhelp syxtem allows definition of a help system to load help on keywords or assembler mnemonics.

Other good editors: QED, The EditorSE, MasterSpy, Elvis, are the editors I use.

Is MicroEmacs full featured compared to UNIX/Linux Emacs? Does it support LISP, shell, full macro recording?

Does this work:

Esc-10, Esc-X Hanoi

First thing I usually try. I used that back in the 90s to test the terminal program I wrote for the QL to see if all my control charters worked properly. In fact, the whole point of creating the terminal program was so I could log into my work's UNIX server and use Emacs to get its full use (multiple shells, etc, all in a 24x80 terminal window).

> Is MicroEmacs full featured compared to UNIX/Linux Emacs? Does it support LISP, shell, full macro recording?

I've not use Emacs, but I don't think it and MicroEmacs are very similar. MicroEmacs does not use Lisp as a scripting language (luckily). IIRC, MicroEmacs does use the ESC key to access commands, like Emacs. I think there is a MicroEmacs for Linux. I used the MS-DOS version back in the 90's, which is still usable via DOSbox.

Tim

swensont wrote: Sat Sep 13, 2025 6:22 pmI wrote my own simple version of roff, to print out the QHJ.

I'm interested. Would you mind posting the program here?