Date   : Mon, 17 Aug 1987 11:29:22 PDT
From   : Bridger Mitchell <bridger%rcc@rand-unix.ARPA>
Subject: Re: EMACS for CP/M

MINCE (Mince Is not Complete Emacs) was written by Mark of the
Unicorn, Cambridge MA about 5 years ago, with a companion SCRIBBLE
formatter (a watered down SCRIBE).  It included source code (for bds-c
1.4x) for the "outer" editor routines and was extensible by
recompiling/relinking. It's got the basic emacs flavor:  8 buffers,
split screen, auto-insert, virtual memory, ...  It lacks the high-end
stuff: regular expressions, incremental search, bindable macros, etc.
The MINCE+SCRIBBLE+BDS-C package was called Amethyst; and there are
archived simtel20 files for the Amethyst user's group.

Perfect Writer is an imperfectly-realized modification of MINCE that
put the command-bindings into the swap file (making the bindings
configurable without recompilation), added hooks for spell and
help modes, and wrapped the editor and formatter inside an optional
shell menu.  It was marketed by Perfect Software, which was bought by
Thorne-EMI.

Perfect Writer was now and againn bundled with Kaypros, and at
Plu*Perfect Systems we developed enhancements and bug fixes that
patched the Kaypro version of PW into the co-called "Plu*Perfect
Writer" (PPW).

I use PPW and MINCE almost exclusively on CP/M machines, and use
several unix and ms-dos flavors of emacs.  For text and program
editing the cp/m versions serve me well.

How can you get MINCE or PW ?  I really don't know.  Unicorn won't
sell to end-users and long ago stopped support of MINCE.  Possibly
EMI would have a PW.  Plu*Perfect supports P*PW, doesn't sell PW;
you have to have the original PW yourself.

--bridger mitchell