I've never Genera but the stuff on Rainer's site look amazing. I wonder what we might have if all the effort put into the C based OS Linux had been put into an open source version of Genera instead?

I read most of this manual (printer problems), but didn't see much that I don't already have in Emacs. What makes Zmacs better than Emacs?

It's kind of hard to appreciate the differences from reading a description. It's even hard to appreciate it from using Zmacs. Where the light dawns is when you've been using Zmacs for a while and go back to using plain old Emacs.

What, you mean there's no keystroke to bring up a list of every change I've made in every file on the box? What, you mean there's code on the box whose source I can't pop up with a keystroke? What, you mean I have to run some sort of tags program on source files before I can find definitions? What, you mean there's code on the box that isn't cross-referenced? What, you mean there's running code on the box whose source I can't step into? What, you mean I can't insert references to objects on the screen into my code just by clicking the screen objects?

Zmacs is tightly integrated with Genera, and it's Lisp all the way down to the microcode. Emacs is great, don't get me wrong, but it's at a different remove from the system.

Thanks mikel, great description!