This shar file contains the source to a microemacs-derived text editor
that I have been personally hacking on for over a decade.

Originally this was MicroEMACS 3.6 as released to mod.sources and the
Public Domain by Daniel Lawrence in 1986, and was itself based on the
work of Steve Wilhite and George Jones to MicroEMACS 2.0 (then also
public domain) by Dave Conroy. I would like to reiterate Lawrence's
thanks to them for writing such nice, well structured and documented
code.

"Ersatz-Emacs", as I call it today, is the above text editor throughly
cleansed of routines and features that I personally never use. It is
also an editor MINIX-creator Andy Tanenbaum could describe as "fitting
inside a student's brain" (namely, mine).

This source code should compile cleanly on any "modern" UN*X system
with a termcap/curses library. This release has been tested with
NetBSD and various Linux systems, although in the past when it was
still mostly MicroEMACS, proto-Ersatz-Emacs was an editor of choice on
SunOS, Solaris, Xenix, Minix/i386, and AIX. Supporting these and
similar systems should not be difficult.

I encourage people to personalise this very simple editor to their own
requirements. Please send any useful bug reports and fixes back to me,
but I'm not really interested in incorporating new features unless it
simplifies the program further. Feel free to do a code-fork and
distribute your own perfect text editor.

The title "Ersatz" comes from the category Richard Stallman uses in
MIT AI Memo 519a to describe those editors that are a surface-deep
imitation (key bindings) of "real" ITS Emacs. If you are familiar with
any Emacs-variant editor, you should have few problems with Ersatz.

All source code of this program is in the Public Domain. I am a rabid
Stallmanite weenie, but it would be improper to publish this under a
different licence than it was given to me with.

-- 
Chris Baird,, <cjb@brushtail.apana.org.au>
