(Note: this document was originally written around 1986 by either Dave Conroy, the original author of MicroEMACS, or Brian Straight; my memory of its exact origin is not clear. I have updated it since then, but it still retains historical information about computers and terminals no longer in use.)
This document describes MicroEMACS, a public-domain1 display editor, loosely based on EMACS, that runs on little computers. It is intended as a reference manual for users already familiar with EMACS.
We call it Micro EMACS to emphasize the fact that most of the commands are very similar to, if not identical to, fundamental mode EMACS commands (actually, it implements a set of rebindings used by a group of users at Digital Equipment Corporation2).
We call it Micro EMACS to emphasize the fact that it is but a shadow of full EMACS. No attempt has been made to make MicroEMACS wildly customizable (without writing code), or to have extensive online documentation. All of this sophistication was thrown away right at the start, because it was important that MicroEMACS run on little computers. In all fairness, is should be stated here and now that the most popular small computer these days is the MicroVAX3!
History
MicroEMACS is loosely based on the EMACS display editor written by Richard Stallman at MIT. The MicroEMACS described by this document is Conroy's version 30 of February 1986, distributed to USENET mod.sources. Since then it has undergone a fair number of bug fixes and performance improvements, and a few minor enhancements.
This version of MicroEMACS is not to be confused with other popular versions that are derived from Conroy's 1986 release, including the once-popular Daniel Lawrence version, and the Linus Torvalds version.
2018 Update
I have lost the original source of Conroy's version of MicroEMACS (including the TeX version
of this document), and I cannot find it on Google's USENET archive.
I have also lost my DOS and OS/2 source
code, though the Windows code (in the nt subdirectory) still exists.
This document contains many reference to historical machines and operating
systems, but I have kept them for historical interest. I maintain
only the Linux version now.
In the 80s, MicroEMACS was small enough to run easily from a floppy disk, but the amount of text that
could be edited was limited by the very small amount of available RAM
(640kb on PCs running MS-DOS). Nowadays this limit is effectively non-existent, give the huge amount of memory
found in modern computers, but MicroEMACS is still small enough to be run from a floppy disk
(if one could be found); its code size is about the same as /bin/ls on a current 64-bit
Linux distribution.