Lucid Emacs was released 30 years ago

nnreddit-user · 2022-08-21 16:06

Developer marketing during the 90s: Lucid: A 30-minute video reminding us the only thing more boring than debugging is watching someone else do it. Microsoft: "Developers, developers, developers!" Hard to overlook the irony of Lucid calling their product "Energize."

fazalmajid · 2022-08-21 19:00

I used it in 1993 on my then brand new DECstation 3000/300L with a DEC Alpha CPU because at the time GNU Emacs was not 64-bit clean.

slk_g500 · 2022-08-21 19:58

Video promo is not so great. But interesting to see nowadays. In contrast take a look of ms excel ad from '90 [https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A](https://youtu.be/kOO31qFmi9A) ;) Dose anyone have adverts of other text editors?

ifixcomputers4money · 2022-08-21 23:35

Still using it today on Debian. I dislike GTK, and console only has limitations. No real stumbling blocks to speak of.

quantum_mattress · 2022-08-22 00:26

Was this the version that linked into Cadence’s Verilog simulator as an IDE? It was great but dropped not long after.

ws-ilazki · 2022-08-22 00:47

> Still using it today on Debian. Same here, but not because of gtk hate. I switched to emacs-lucid because the gtk version had an odd bug where certain colours would be displayed subtly wrong and it was driving me crazy. Like if I used the same hex value for the window background and the background behind text, they'd be slightly different if compared with an eyedropper tool and it was just different enough that I could *see* it. So I tried the lucid version, no colour bug there, and stuck with it. As a bonus, it behaves better over remote X sessions: it's fast and responsive whereas emacs-gtk is slow and choppy due to sending pixmaps around constantly.

donio · 2022-08-22 01:54

You can build regular Emacs for X11 but without GTK. I build it with `--without-x-toolkit`, this gives an X11 build but no widget library dependency at all. This is fine if you don't care for GUI menus or toolbars, the rest of the X functionality still works (fonts, image display, svg etc). Using one of the other supported toolkits is another option: ``` --with-x-toolkit=KIT use an X toolkit (KIT one of: yes or gtk, gtk2, gtk3, lucid or athena, motif, no) ```

bitwize · 2022-08-22 02:05

Lucid Emacs is a fork of GNU Emacs from the early 90s that eventually became XEmacs when Lucid went tits up. What you're using is emacs-lucid, a version of GNU Emacs retrofitted with a widget set designed to make it *look* like XEmacs.

bitwize · 2022-08-22 02:07

Ah, Energize. When the Blue Fairy tapped Emacs with her magic wand and turned it into a *real* IDE. (Albeit a profoundly clunky one.)

junglee33 · 2022-08-22 02:28

you misspelled jwz

arthurno1 · 2022-08-22 07:30

> I switched to emacs-lucid because the gtk version had an odd bug where certain colours would be displayed subtly wrong Can you post a screenshot compared with Gtk? Also wonder how is your text looking in Lucid?

arthurno1 · 2022-08-22 07:31

Same here. I toss in Cairo though; otherwise text is looking horrible.

ws-ilazki · 2022-08-22 23:09

I don't have a direct comparison but [this post has a screenshot of the subtle colour variation](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4w26a7/strange_behaviour_with_background_colours/) I was talking about. You can use an eyedropper and see that the blank space before the letters has a slightly different hex value than blank spaces on blank lines; in the configuration they're the same hex value, though. Depending on your display it may not be noticeable to the eye; my IPS display unfortunately made it *very obvious* and it drove me insane seeing it. I don't have a side-by-side comparison or anything but [here's an older screenshot of the (overall) same theme with emacs-lucid](https://imgur.com/BVUOEUV). Sorry I don't have a more recent screenshot handy, I *know* I have one where I updated my theme but I can't find it right now. To be fair, this bug was from six years ago and may be fixed by now; it's just what led to me switching in the first place and I never had a reason to go back.

emaphis · 2022-08-23 02:37

The Erlang demo from about 1990 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIjfIjssLE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIjfIjssLE) The editor is, of course, Emacs.

slk_g500 · 2022-08-23 07:09

[https://youtu.be/xrIjfIjssLE?t=211](https://youtu.be/xrIjfIjssLE?t=211) That's funny scene. 'Is system working?'

Goator · 2022-08-23 15:15

I compile emacs with lucid instead of gtk because of this bug in gtk: > Warning: due to a long standing Gtk+ bug > https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/221 > Emacs might crash when run in daemon mode and the X11 connection is unexpectedly lost. > Using an Emacs configured with --with-x-toolkit=lucid does not have this problem.