Epsilon Programmer's Editor

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/

Or Atom: https://atom.io/

Or even Emacs: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

Even Vim's web site starts with a short summary: 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.

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

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

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

> 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.

It depends on how much you've got loaded. Most serious emacs users have a vast corpus of elisp loading on boot. Nowadays, some people will load the elisp lazily, so the files are only evaluated of you use their functions.

This is also why emacsclient exists: To try to amortize the startup cost.

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