I downloaded and built QEmacs. It's a good enough Emacs I could almost use it! Which is inspiring, since it was an individual spare-time project by one person, even if that one person is Fabrice Bellard. So I thought I'd take some notes on its deficiencies to see if it's fixable, or how much more work would be needed to make something really usable.
open a C file and type
typedef struct node {
and QEmacs takes you to the beginning of the line. Follow that up with
enum { and it happens again.
Type typedef int buf[4]; and it happens again. I think this is just
part of a general problem it has with indenting C.
Yes, it can open a text file of nearly 300 megabytes. But going to the end of the file is slow.
Doesn't support M-^, M-;.
C-x C-e (compile) tries to execute the make command in the directory where qemacs started, not where the file is.
repeated C-k doesn't append to the latest kill-ring item as it should, so you can't use it to cut blocks of text.
M-q takes you out of your paragraph, so you can't just keep typing.
Redisplay is visibly slow and not double-buffered.
Doesn't support ~ in filenames.
Doesn't support M-/
Control-backspace is "help" instead of "backward-kill-word".
When there's pending keyboard input, it wastes time updating the screen with already-stale state!
Undo works in individual buffer changes, rather than commands, which is quite suboptimal with M-q and also with undoing typing.
Doesn't support prefix arguments. M-5 M-6 M-g prompts you for a line number.
M-y (yank-pop) causes subsequent C-y to yank the same thing. Maybe this is an improvement.
Still, it's impressive how much like Emacs it can feel with only 88 commands!