Epsilon Programmer's Editor

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??

I&#x27;m a 20+ year daily gnu&#x2F;x emacs user and purchased a copy of Epsilon in July after demoing it for a couple weeks. Since then I&#x27;ve been coding in Epsilon daily (Linux&#x2F;C++):<p>What I love about it: 1) it&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s a beautiful piece of software and I&#x27;ve really enjoyed using it. No regrets on the purchase. To me it was worth the $250.

For some reason, I find it gratifying that this operation has been in business (more or less) for 32 years.<p>I can feel a strong sense of pride in the application he&#x27;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.<p>Each order gets you copies for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OS&#x2F;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.

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

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.<p>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.

I&#x27;ll stick with Emacs for now. $250 is a bit heavy for those of us with little disposable income.<p>In addition, I fail to see the advantage of this over Emacs: Emacs already has pretty much all of Epsilon&#x27;s features, and a larger community. Furthermore, I highly doubt that its extensibility features are as extensive.<p>It&#x27;s kinda cool, though.<p>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?

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).

I think &quot;ϵpsilon&quot; was my first programmer&#x27;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 <i>so much</i> better than nearly all of the alternatives, even though I didn&#x27;t use its IDE features.<p>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.<p>And then I never looked back. From then on I used my 286 to run Procomm+ and Vernon Buerg&#x27;s LIST.COM, not to write programs on. Sorry, ϵpsilon. Emacs is an entire universe.<p>(Since then I&#x27;ve also programmed in vim, IDEA, Eclipse, some prototype editors I&#x27;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.)

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.

Been using Epsilon daily since 1989. I&#x27;ve been disillusioned lately that it&#x27;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.

I used epsilon for all my programming work until I discovered vi in &#x27;93. It ran on dos, and OS&#x2F;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&#x2F;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.

I hope Emacs guys will finish the GuileEmacs[1] project.<p>They listed 3 main advantages:<p>&quot;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.<p>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.<p>A third advantage is all Guile APIs&#x2F;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.&quot;<p>And looks like there is some progress still: [2]<p>Here is the current TODO list [3], if someone wants to help.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;GuileEmacs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;GuileEmacs</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.gnu.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;html&#x2F;guile-devel&#x2F;2016-03&#x2F;msg00028.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.gnu.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;html&#x2F;guile-devel&#x2F;2016-03&#x2F;msg00...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;GuileEmacsTodo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emacswiki.org&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;GuileEmacsTodo</a>

Lugaru is from the french word &#x27;Loup-Garou&#x27; 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 &#x27;get the latest hip named thing&#x27; kinda crowd.

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 &#x27;craft&#x27;. 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.<p>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&#x2F;log files. I turn to VS only when i have to code something in C#, use PyCharm for python things.<p>Bottom line when an IDE &#x27;just clicks&#x27; for you then its a wonderfully productive tool.

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

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!

I&#x27;ve heard of Epsilon, but never used it.<p>Back in the days when I actually paid for text editors, my favorite was Multi-Edit (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;multieditsoftware.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;multieditsoftware.com&#x2F;</a>). I remember UltraEdit (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ultraedit.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ultraedit.com&#x2F;</a>) being pretty popular too.<p>Nowadays, whatever work I&#x27;m not doing in Visual Studio is being done in Notepad++.

I&#x27;ve been using Epsilon for 25+ years. It&#x27;s great, and well worth the money I have spent on the updates over the past few decades. It&#x27;s my go-to editor. I can get along in vanilla Emacs, but Epsilon is a lot friendlier on a Windows box.<p>There&#x27;s not much I would change on the Windows version (better multiple monitor support might be interesting0. I <i>would</i> pay dear money for better MacOS support.

The OSX deployment not being a &quot;verified developer&quot; shuts down anyone in an enterprise environment. That&#x27;s too bad, I wanted to try it at work.

(Perhaps a bit off-topic) Another non-free editor that&#x27;s been around for a while is BBEdit. It&#x27;s always been Mac-only, unfortunately.

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

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

We changed the title from “A mighty editor still being sold after 30 years for $250”, which breaks the HN guidelines for editorializing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Its extension language looks very interesting. It looks very powerful while having domain-specific features (I&#x27;ve noticed ‘user’, ‘command’, and ‘save_var’ keywords). See e.g. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lugaru.com&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;for-v13&#x2F;cmake.e" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lugaru.com&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;for-v13&#x2F;cmake.e</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lugaru.com&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;for-v13&#x2F;lispmode.e" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lugaru.com&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;for-v13&#x2F;lispmode.e</a><p>Also, the demo is extremely snappy. Shame it doesn&#x27;t seem to have vi emulation (unless I missed it?) or org-mode, both of which are killer features of emacs for me.

Epsilon is great. Let me offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It&#x27;s a secret weapon, an unfair advantage we have, those of us in the know.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>If you have any emacs in your soul, buy Epsilon. Now.