IntroductionThis is the guide to the XEmacs Frequently Asked Questions list it is a compendium of questions and answers pertaining to one of the finest programs ever written. It is much more than just a Text Editor.
Learning XEmacs is a lifelong activity. I've been using Emacs for over a decade now, and I'm still discovering new features. Therefore this document cannot be complete. Instead it is aimed at the person who is either considering XEmacs for their own use, or has just obtained it and is wondering what to do next. It is also useful as a reference to available resources.
The previous maintainer of the FAQ was Anthony Rossini <rossini@stat.sc.edu>, who started it, after getting tired of hearing JWZ complain about repeatedly having to answer questions. Ben Wing <ben@666.com> and Chuck Thompson <cthomp@xemacs.org>, the principal authors of XEmacs, then took over and Ben did a massive update reorganizing the whole thing. At which point Anthony took back over, but then had to give it up again . Some of the other contributors to this FAQ are listed later in this document.
The previous version was converted to hypertext format, and edited by Steven L. Baur <steve@altair.xemacs.org>.
Since Steve Baur is so busy putting out multiple versions of XEmacs I have taken on the task of maintaining the FAQ. I use XEmacs on a daily basis and I wanted to give something back to the community that has made XEmacs possible. If you notice any errors or items which should be added or amended to this FAQ please send email to Andreas Kaempf <andreas@sccon.com>. Include XEmacs FAQ on the Subject: line.
This FAQ is freely redistributable. I take no liability for the correctness and safety of any procedures or advice given here. This FAQ is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
If you have a Web browser, the official hypertext version is at: <http://www.sccon.com/~andreas/xemacs-faq.html>, and also at: <http://www.xemacs.org/faq/xemacs-faq.html>. This version is much nicer than the unofficial hypertext versions that are archived at Utrecht, Oxford, Smart Pages, and other FAQ archives.
Changes this month:
This file was last modified on Feburary 23, 1998.
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1.0 Introduction
Q1.0.1 What is XEmacs?Q1.0.2 What is the current version of XEmacs?The next feature release will be XEmacs 20.4.
XEmacs 19.16 was the last release of v19, released in November, 1997, which was also the last version without international language support.
Q1.0.3 Where can I find it?Q1.0.4 Why Another Version of EmacsQ1.0.5 Why Haven't XEmacs and GNU Emacs Merged?If you have a comment to add regarding the merge, it is a good idea to avoid posting to the newsgroups, because of the very heated flamewars that often result. Mail your questions to <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org> and<bug-gnu-emacs@prep.ai.mit.edu>.
Q1.0.6 Where can I get help?C-h i, or selecting Emacs Info from the
Help Menu.
Also, M-x apropos will look for commands for you.
Try reading this FAQ, examining the regular GNU Emacs FAQ (which can be found with the Emacs 19 distribution) as well as at <http://www.eecs.nwu.edu/emacs/faq/> and reading the Usenet group comp.emacs.xemacs. If that does not help, try posting your question to comp.emacs.xemacs. Please Do Not post XEmacs related questions to gnu.emacs.help.
If you cannot post or read Usenet news, there is a corresponding mailing list which is available. It can be subscribed to by sending a message with a subject of subscribe to xemacs-request@xemacs.org for subscription information and xemacs@xemacs.org to send messages to the list.
To cancel a subscription, you must use the xemacs-request address. Send a message with a subject of unsubscribe to be removed.
Q1.0.7 Where is the mailing list archived?However, this archive is out of date. The current mailing list server supports an `archive' feature, which may be utilized.
Q1.0.8 How do you pronounce XEmacs?Q1.0.9 What does XEmacs look like?Q1.0.10 Is there a port of XEmacs to Microsoft ('95 or NT)?The NT development is now coordinated by a mailing list at <xemacs-nt@xemacs.org>. If you are willing to contribute or want to follow the progress, mail to <xemacs-nt-request@xemacs.org> to subscribe.
Furthermore, Altrasoft is seeking corporate and government sponsors to help fund a fully native port of XEmacs to Windows 95 and NT using full-time, senior-level staff working under a professionally managed project structure.
See <http://www.altrasoft.com/> for more details or contact Altrasoft directly at 1-888-ALTSOFT.
The closest is Win-Emacs, which is based on Lucid Emacs 19.6. Available from <http://www.pearlsoft.com/>.
There's a port of GNU Emacs (not XEmacs) at
<http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs.html>.
Q1.0.11 Is there a port of XEmacs to the Macintosh?Q1.0.12 Is there a port of XEmacs to NextStep?Q1.0.13 Is there a port of XEmacs to OS/2?Q1.0.14 Where can I obtain a printed copy of the XEmacs users manual? E-mail: <info@xemacs.com>
Tel: +1 408 243 3300
1.1 PolicyQ1.1.1 What is the FAQ editorial policy?Changes are displayed on a monthly basis. Months, for this purpose are defined as the 5th of the month through the 5th of the month. Preexisting questions that have been changed are marked as such. Brand new questions are tagged.
All submissions are welcome. E-mail submissions to Andreas Kaempf <andreas@sccon.com>. Please make sure that XEmacs FAQ appears on the Subject: line. If you think you have a better way of answering a question, or think a question should be included, I'd like to hear about it. Questions and answers included into the FAQ will be edited for spelling and grammar, and will be attributed. Answers appearing without attribution are either from versions of the FAQ dated before May 1996, or are from one of the four people listed at the top of this document. Answers quoted from Usenet news articles will always be attributed, regardless of the author.
Q1.1.2 How do I become a Beta Tester?Be prepared to get your hands dirty, as beta testers are expected to identify problems as best they can.
Q1.1.3 How do I contribute to XEmacs itself?BTW if you have a wish list of things that you want added, you have to speak up about it! More specifically, you can do the following if you want a feature added (in increasing order of usefulness):
1.2 CreditsQ1.2.1 Who wrote XEmacs?![[Picture of Chuck Thompson]](cthomp.gif)
Chuck was Mr. XEmacs from 19.11 through 19.14, and is responsible for XEmacs becoming a widely distributed program over the Internet.
![[Picture of Ben Wing]](wing.gif)
![[Picture of Jamie Zawinski]](jwz.gif)
Q1.2.2 Who contributed to this version of the FAQ?Q1.2.3 Who contributed to the FAQ in the past?1.3 InternationalizationQ1.3.1 What is the status of XEmacs v20?As of XEmacs 20.3, version 20 is the supported version of XEmacs. This means that 19.16 will optionally receive stability fixes (if any), but that all the real development work will be done on the v20 tree.
The incompatible changes in XEmacs 20 include the additional byte-codes, new primitive data types (character, char-table, and range-table). This means that the character-integer equivalence inherent to all the previous Emacs and XEmacs releases no longer applies.
However, to avoid breaking old code, many functions that should normally accept characters work with integers, and vice versa. For more information, see the Lisp reference manual. Here is a relevant excerpt, for your convenience.
In XEmacs version 19, and in all versions of FSF GNU Emacs, a "character" in XEmacs Lisp is nothing more than an integer. This is yet another holdover from XEmacs Lisp's derivation from vintage-1980 Lisps; modern versions of Lisp consider this equivalence a bad idea, and have separate character types. In XEmacs version 20, the modern convention is followed, and characters are their own primitive types. (This change was necessary in order for MULE, i.e. Asian-language, support to be correctly implemented.)
Even in XEmacs version 20, remnants of the equivalence between characters and integers still exist; this is termed the "char-int confoundance disease". In particular, many functions such as eq, equal, and memq have equivalent functions (old-eq, old-equal, old-memq, etc.) that pretend like characters are integers are the same. Byte code compiled under any version 19 Emacs will have all such functions mapped to their old- equivalents when the byte code is read into XEmacs 20. This is to preserve compatibility - Emacs 19 converts all constant characters to the equivalent integer during byte-compilation, and thus there is no other way to preserve byte-code compatibility even if the code has specifically been written with the distinction between characters and integers in mind.
Every character has an equivalent integer, called the "character code". For example, the character A is represented as the integer 65, following the standard ASCII representation of characters. If XEmacs was not compiled with MULE support, the range of this integer will always be 0 to 255 - eight bits, or one byte. (Integers outside this range are accepted but silently truncated; however, you should most decidedly not rely on this, because it will not work under XEmacs with MULE support.) When MULE support is present, the range of character codes is much larger. (Currently, 19 bits are used.)
FSF GNU Emacs uses kludgy character codes above 255 to represent keyboard input of ASCII characters in combination with certain modifiers. XEmacs does not use this (a more general mechanism is used that does not distinguish between ASCII keys and other keys), so you will never find character codes above 255 in a non-MULE XEmacs.
Individual characters are not often used in programs. It is far more common to work with strings, which are sequences composed of characters.
Q1.3.2 What is the status of Asian-language support, aka MULE?As the fundings on Mule have stopped, Mule part of XEmacs is currently looking for a full-time maintainer. If you can provide help here, or are willing to fund the work, please mail to <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>. If you can help out here, please see Q1.1.2.
Q1.3.3 I speak a language that uses a lot of non-ASCII characters. How do I type them in?Q1.3.4 Can I get the messages output by XEmacs to come out in a different language?Emacs*XlwMenu.resourceLabels: True Emacs*XlwMenu.file.labelString: Fichier Emacs*XlwMenu.openInOtherWindow.labelString: In anderem Fenster öffnenThe name of the resource is derived from the non-localized entry by removing punctuation and capitalizing as above. Martin Buchholz <Martin.Buchholz@sun.com> is working on adding support for Asian language menubar localization to XEmacs 20.
Q1.3.5 Please explain the various input methods in MULE/XEmacs 20.0Wnn supports Japanese, Chinese and Korean. It is made by OMRON and Kyôto university. It is a powerful and complex system. Wnn4 is free and Wnn6 is not free.
Canna supports only Japanese. It is made by NEC. It is a simple and powerful system. Canna uses only grammar (Wnn uses grammar and probability between words), so I think Wnn is cleverer than Canna, however Canna users made a good grammar and dictionary. So for standard modern Japanese, Canna seems cleverer than Wnn4. In addition, the UNIX version of Canna is free (now there is a Microsoft Windows version).
SJ3 supports only Japanese. It is made by Sony.
XIM supports was made to use ATOK (a major input method in personal computer world). XIM is the standard for accessing input methods bundled in Japanese versions of Solaris. (XEmacs 20 will support XIM input).
Egg consists of following parts:
(canna-boil), and there are some boiled-egg
like utilities.
In addition, it was planned to make an abstraction for all transfer type input methods. However authors of input methods are busy, so maybe this plan is stopped. Perhaps after Mule merged FSF Emacs will be released, it will be continued.
Q1.3.6 How do I portably code for MULE/XEmacs 20.0?MULE and the next version of Emacs are similar but the symbols are very different -- requiring separate code as well.
Namely we must support 3 kinds of mule variants and 4 or 5 or 6 kinds of emacs variants... (;_;)
I'm shocked, so I wrote a wrapper package called emu to provide a common interface.
I have the following suggestions about dealing with mule variants:
(featurep 'mule) is t on all mule variants
(boundp 'MULE) is t on only MULE. Maybe
the next version of Emacs will not have this symbol.
mule-version.
Perhaps the next version of Emacs will have this variable as well.
Following is a sample to distinguish mule variants:
(if (featurep 'mule)
(cond ((boundp 'MULE)
;; for original Mule
)
((string-match "XEmacs" emacs-version)
;; for XEmacs with Mule
)
(t
;; for next version of Emacs
))
;; for old emacs variants
)
Q1.3.7 How about Cyrillic Modes?There is a cyrillic mode in the file mysetup.zip in <ftp://ftp.math.ohio-state.edu/pub/users/ilya/emacs/>.
Dima Barsky <d.barsky@ee.surrey.ac.uk> writes:
There is another cyrillic mode for both GNU Emacs and XEmacs by Dmitrii
(Mitya) Manin <manin@camelot.mssm.edu> at
<http://camelot.mssm.edu/~manin/cyr.el>.
1.4 Getting Started, Backing up & RecoveryQ1.4.1 What is a .emacs and is there one I can look at so I can build my own?Starting with 19.14, you may bring the sample.emacs into an XEmacs buffer by selecting Help->Sample .emacs from the menubar. To determine the location of the etc directory type the command C-h v data-directory RET.
Q1.4.2 Can I use the same .emacs with the other Emacs?Q1.4.3 Any good tutorials around?
There's an Emacs Lisp tutorial at:
<ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/emacs-lisp-intro-1.04.tar.gz>.
Erik Sundermann <erik@petaxp.rug.ac.be> has made a tutorial web page at <http://petaxp.rug.ac.be/~erik/xemacs/>.
Q1.4.4 May I see an example of an XEmacs Lisp function that does something with text near the cursor?
(defun double-word (count)
"Insert a copy of the current word underneath the cursor"
(interactive "*p")
(let (here there string)
(save-excursion
(forward-word -1)
(setq here (point))
(forward-word 1)
(setq there (point))
(setq string (buffer-substring here there)))
(while (>= count 1)
(insert string)
(decf count))))
The best way to see what is going on here is to let XEmacs tell you.
Put the code into an XEmacs buffer, and do a C-h f with the
cursor sitting just to
the right of the function you want explained. Eg. move the cursor to
the SPACE between interactive and "*p" and hit
C-h f to see
what the function interactive does. Doing this will tell you
that the * requires a writable buffer, and p converts
the prefix argument to a number, and interactive allows
you to execute the command with M-x.
Q1.4.5 And how do I bind it to a key?(global-set-key "\C-cd" 'double-word)Or interactively, M-x global-set-key and follow the prompts.
Jari Aalto has written a guide to Emacs keys binding, available at
<ftp://cs.uta.fi/pub/ssjaaa/ema-keys.gui>.
Q1.4.6 What's the difference between a macro and a function?Macros enable you to define new control constructs and other language features. A macro is defined much like a function, but instead of telling how to compute a value, it tells how to compute another Lisp expression which will in turn compute the value. We call this expression the expansion of the macro.
Macros can do this because they operate on the unevaluated expressions for the arguments, not on the argument values as functions do. They can therefore construct an expansion containing these argument expressions or parts of them.
Do not confuse the two terms with "keyboard macros", which are another matter, entirely. A keyboard macro is a key bound to several other keys. Refer to manual for details.
Q1.4.7 How come options saved with 19.13 don't work with 19.14 or later?
(add-spec-list-to-specifier (face-property 'searchm-field 'font)
'((global (nil))))
saved by a 19.13 XEmacs that causes a 19.14 XEmacs grief. You must delete
these options. XEmacs 19.14 and later no longer writes the options directly
to .emacs which should allow us to deal with version
incompatibilities better in the future.
Options saved under XEmacs 19.13 are protected by code that specifically requires a version 19 XEmacs. This won't be a problem unless you're testing XEmacs v20. You should consider changing the code to read:
(cond
((and (string-match "XEmacs" emacs-version)
(boundp 'emacs-major-version)
(or (and (= emacs-major-version 19)
(>= emacs-minor-version 12))
(>= emacs-major-version 20)))
...
This FAQ is Copyright © 1998 by various people and edited by Andreas Kaempf. Please send comments, and suggestions to Andreas Kaempf <andreas@sccon.com>.