1[This is an edited version of the original mg README, updated slightly to 2reflect changes in the last 20 years.] 3 4 5Mg (mg) is a Public Domain EMACS style editor. It is "broadly" 6compatible with GNU Emacs, the latest creation of Richard M. 7Stallman, Chief GNUisance and inventor of Emacs. GNU Emacs (and other 8portions of GNU as they are released) are essentially free, (there are 9handling charges for obtaining it) and so is Mg. You may never have 10to learn another editor. (But probably will, at least long enough to 11port Mg...) Mg was formerly named MicroGnuEmacs, the name change was 12done at the request of Richard Stallman. 13 14Mg is not associated with the GNU project, and it does not have the 15copyright restrictions present in GNU Emacs. (However, some modules 16do have copyright notices.) The Mg authors individually may or may 17not agree with the opinions expressed by Richard Stallman in "The GNU 18Manifesto". 19 20This program is intended to be a small, fast, and portable editor for 21people who can't (or don't want to) run real Emacs for one reason 22or another. It is compatible with GNU because there shouldn't be 23any reason to learn more than one Emacs flavor. 24 25 26Beyond the work of Dave Conroy, author of the original public domain 27v30, the current version contains the work of: 28 29 blarson@ecla.usc.edu Bob Larson 30 mic@emx.utexas.edu Mic Kaczmarczik 31 mwm@violet.berkeley.edu Mike Meyer 32 sandra@cs.utah.edu Sandra Loosemore 33 mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu Michael Portuesi 34 RCKG01M@CALSTATE.BITNET Stephen Walton 35 hakanson@mist.cs.orst.edu Marion Hakanson 36 37People who have worked on previous versions of Mg: 38 39 rtech!daveb@sun.com Dave Brower 40 41Early release history: 42 43* Nov 16, 1986: First release to mod.sources 44* Mar 3, 1987: First Release (mg1a) via comp.sources.unix 45* May 26, 1988: Second release: (mg2a) via comp.sources.misc 46* Jan 26, 1992: Linux port released by Charles Hedrick. This version 47 later makes its way onto tsx-11, Infomagic, and various other Linux 48 repositories. 49* Feb 25, 2000: First import into the OpenBSD tree, where it is 50 currently maintained with contributions from many others. 51 52---------------------------------------------------------------------- 53 54Known limitations: 55 56Recursive bindings may cause help and key rebinding code to go into 57an infinite loop, aborting with a stack overflow. 58 59Overwrite mode does not work in macros. (Characters are inserted 60rather than overwriting.) 61 62Dired mode has some problems: .. and . are not recognized as special 63cases. Also, mg uses the output of the command 'ls' to populate a 64dired buffer. This is not ideal, dired mode should probably be 65rewritten to use the directory(3) set of functions. 66 67On systems with 16 bit integers, the kill buffer cannot exceed 32767 68bytes. 69 70Unlike GNU Emacs, Mg's minibuffer isn't multi-line aware and hence 71some commands like "shell-command-on-region" always pop up a buffer to 72display output irrespective of output's size. 73 74While navigating source code using Mg's cscope commands, the cursor 75is always at the match location rather than in *cscope* buffer. Mg uses 76the same keybindings of GNU Emacs's xcscope package for it's cscope commands. 77As Mg's keybindings are case-insensitive some of the commands don't have a 78default keybinding. 79 80New implementation oddities: 81 82insert and define-key are new commands corresponding to the mocklisp 83functions in GNU Emacs. (Mg does not have non-command functions.) 84(Mg's insert will only insert one string.) 85 86The display wrap code does not work at all like that of GNU emacs. 87 88Some commands that do not mimic emacs exactly don't have a "standard" 89emacs name. For example 'backup-to-home-directory' is only a partial 90implementation of emacs' range of commands that allow a user to 91customise the backup file location. If a more complete implementation 92were coded of these commands the non standard commands would probably 93be removed. 94