Does anyone here have an experience running older versions of GNU Emacs, I'm considering downgrading to 21. (20 or 19 might be even better, but would involve more porting, and archive hunting.) Especially if you still one of these old releases I'd be very interested in hearing from you.
I recently tried various EMACS derivatives other than GNU Emacs. It seems that unfortunately all of the Common Lisp Emacsen are in an unusable state, with perhaps the exception of lem which I admittedly did not try due to the addition of an electron interface which lead me to assume the project was rotten.
Although I use mg on occasion microEmacs derivatives are insufficiently powerful, with potentially the exception of EmACT which I can't easily read the documentation since it is in .doc format, and didn't feel like running.
I've heard/seen people actually running Edwin unlike most of these other applications. I could see it being a viable replacement, although haven't looked into it much.