The real hinderance for the RISC machines was the lack of any cross compiler. Although having built stuff for PowerPC on OS X i386, it was far too often a best effort guess if it’d run, and all too easy did it run on Rosetta emulation, but not bare iron.

https://archive.org/details/SonicFoundryACIDMusic

I don’t remember Emacs 19.34 very well, but I’m pretty sure it had syntax highlighting, drop-down menus (at least on X, but I imagine on Win32 too), etc. It’s just that things like syntax highlighting aren’t turned on out of the box, and neither are CUA keys, so there’s a big learning curve.

Also, a more mainstream contemporary editor, if anyone is interested:

PC Magazine – 13 Sep 1994 – Page 327: “Visual SlickEdit for Windows, Version 1.5 ($295), a programming editor available for Microsoft Windows 3.1 and for Microsoft Windows NT on DEC Alpha AXP, MIPS, and x86 platforms.”

I’ve never tried it, nor do I have it, it just occurred to me that there might have been a SlickEdit build for Alpha, so I checked.

Additionally, this page: ftp://69.43.38.172/mirrors/cd.textfiles.com/cica9710/ALPHA/00_INDEX.HTM contains Emacs 19.17 builds as well as lots of other AXP stuff.

Well I probably should have meant GUI based editor. Emacs and vi decent as they are I wanted some nice GUI with syntax highlighting etc. For text / console editors there will be another post soon.

Just tried to get it working for 5 minutes, but it always crashes on my Alphastation with NT4. I will use some more time on it during the next few days.

On a different note: I just realised that there are alpha binaries of tar, gunzip and gzip here: https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/emacs/windows/utilities/alpha/
They are pretty old (1993), but they do work…

And I often did but VS6 text editor is still poor compared to something like Crimson.