emacs vs edit.com

Posted 2002-07-09 04:14:12 by Jim Crawford I've spent the past few months bouncing between editors, trying to find one that I liked, and since none of them behave exactly the way I want (see edit.com, MS-DOS 6.22), I decided that I might as well bite the bullet and learn Emacs. It took about a week, but I've learned some Emacs and taught Emacs some me while I was at it, and now I like it pretty well. I recommend it. Especially my setup: I use this win32 build, which starts out with the arrow keys and the block of keys above them (del, etc) all configured correctly. I start it with the -rv switch, because otherwise it doesn't seem to accept the cursor color i specify. On top of this, I use cua.el, which adds windows-like block handling (shift to select a block, C-c to copy and C-v to paste). Finally, and this is what took most of that week, I've created a _emacs file (windows doesn't like filenames that start with '.') that handles the tab and enter keys just the way I like them. Specifically, tab does a block indent (shift-tab unindents), and enter copies all the nuances from edit.com: automatically start the next line on the indentation level of the previous line, and if pressed before the first non-whitespace character of the line, bring the entire line down instead of breaking it in two. I should warn you that my code assumes that length of a string and the size of a string as displayed as equal, so if you've made a habit of editing files that contain tab characters, it's likely to misbehave. Sorry. You can get my _emacs file here. There are lots of other useful tweaks in there that you may want to apply, so check it out even if the changes listed above don't appeal to you. [link to this] [See more on “coding”]

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I hate to be boring, but...

Posted by boringguy on 2002-07-11 03:08:47 Windows NT likes filenames that start with '.' Maybe even Windows 9x likes them. But explorer.exe is jealous and refuses to create them. So you have to use something more open-minded, like cmd.exe or command.com, or perhaps an editor with a file save command that doesn't use the common dialog box controls. NTEmacs also parses ~ in filenames (it changes it to c:/.emacs.d), so you don't have to change your directory names in your config files between your Windows and *n?x boxes. NTEmacs doesn't make ~ user-specific. It's system-wide. You can create a proper system-wide configuration by creating a default.el file in the emacs lisp directory. If you want MULE (non-ascii language) support, you'll need the emacs-*-leim.tar.gz file from the build directory mentioned. dotdotdot

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