[This is an edited version of the original mg README, updated slightly to

reflect changes in the last 20 years.]

Mg (mg) is a Public Domain EMACS style editor. It is "broadly"

compatible with GNU Emacs, the latest creation of Richard M.

Stallman, Chief GNUisance and inventor of Emacs. GNU Emacs (and other

portions of GNU as they are released) are essentially free, (there are

handling charges for obtaining it) and so is Mg. You may never have

to learn another editor. (But probably will, at least long enough to

port Mg...) Mg was formerly named MicroGnuEmacs, the name change was

done at the request of Richard Stallman.

Mg is not associated with the GNU project, and it does not have the

copyright restrictions present in GNU Emacs. (However, some modules

do have copyright notices.) The Mg authors individually may or may

not agree with the opinions expressed by Richard Stallman in "The GNU

Manifesto".

This program is intended to be a small, fast, and portable editor for

people who can't (or don't want to) run real Emacs for one reason

or another. It is compatible with GNU because there shouldn't be

any reason to learn more than one Emacs flavor.

Beyond the work of Dave Conroy, author of the original public domain

v30, the current version contains the work of:

blarson@ecla.usc.edu Bob Larson

mic@emx.utexas.edu Mic Kaczmarczik

mwm@violet.berkeley.edu Mike Meyer

sandra@cs.utah.edu Sandra Loosemore

mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu Michael Portuesi

RCKG01M@CALSTATE.BITNET Stephen Walton

hakanson@mist.cs.orst.edu Marion Hakanson

People who have worked on previous versions of Mg:

rtech!daveb@sun.com Dave Brower

Early release history:

* Nov 16, 1986: First release to mod.sources

* Mar 3, 1987: First Release (mg1a) via comp.sources.unix

* May 26, 1988: Second release: (mg2a) via comp.sources.misc

* Jan 26, 1992: Linux port released by Charles Hedrick. This version

later makes its way onto tsx-11, Infomagic, and various other Linux

repositories.

* Feb 25, 2000: First import into the OpenBSD tree, where it is

currently maintained with contributions from many others.

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Known limitations:

Recursive bindings may cause help and key rebinding code to go into

an infinite loop, aborting with a stack overflow.

Overwrite mode does not work in macros. (Characters are inserted

rather than overwriting.)

Dired mode has some problems: .. and . are not recognized as special

cases. Also, mg uses the output of the command 'ls' to populate a

dired buffer. This is not ideal, dired mode should probably be

rewritten to use the directory(3) set of functions.

On systems with 16 bit integers, the kill buffer cannot exceed 32767

bytes.

Unlike GNU Emacs, Mg's minibuffer isn't multi-line aware and hence

some commands like "shell-command-on-region" always pop up a buffer to

display output irrespective of output's size.

While navigating source code using Mg's cscope commands, the cursor

is always at the match location rather than in *cscope* buffer. Mg uses

the same keybindings of GNU Emacs's xcscope package for it's cscope commands.

As Mg's keybindings are case-insensitive some of the commands don't have a

default keybinding.

New implementation oddities:

insert and define-key are new commands corresponding to the mocklisp

functions in GNU Emacs. (Mg does not have non-command functions.)

(Mg's insert will only insert one string.)

The display wrap code does not work at all like that of GNU emacs.

Some commands that do not mimic emacs exactly don't have a "standard"

emacs name. For example 'backup-to-home-directory' is only a partial

implementation of emacs' range of commands that allow a user to

customise the backup file location. If a more complete implementation

were coded of these commands the non standard commands would probably

be removed.