Emacs

Emacs is the self documenting extensible editor. If you have text files that need editing, emacs will enable you to edit them. However, it doesn't stop at editing text, you can also read and send email, read and post to usenet, browse the world wide web, play Tetris, undergo psychoanalysis, edit files remotely through ftp and make the coffee. I made one of those up, although not the one about psychoanalysis.

The Beginners Guide To Emacs

Whilst I was a postgrad student at Keele University I wrote a short guide aimed at Keele students introducing them to the joys of emacs. You can read the short introduction to emacs here.

Unmunge-general.el

This is the latest version of unmunge-general.el, which, when assuming you're a smart individual and use gnus automatically changes your email address and signature file depending on which newsgroups you're posting to or whether you're sending mail.

Click here for full installation instructions.

news-hack.el

news-hack.el is just a small collections of functions to convert the newsrc information about foreign groups (those on servers other than the default server) into a buffer which may be saved as a .newsrc file for that news server.

Usage

Put news-hack.el somewhere emacs can find it.
Start gnus.
Load the library news-hack, using M-x load-library <RET> news-hack <RET>
Run the command netscape-news-create-news-buffers
Save any buffers you want, trying not to overwrite anything important.

This uses a lot of recursive functions. (I think recursive functions are cute.) You may need to increase the value of max-lisp-eval-depth. See the lisp file for more info.

dialog-box.el

dialog-box.el is just a simple piece of code to attach the X file selection utility "xgetfile" to the emacs code to open files. Written to prove a point to someone (who shall remain nameless) that flexibility and extensibility beat mere functionality every time. I don't use it, and only know how to attach it to a menu in XEmacs using


    (add-menu-button '("File") ["Open..." find-file-dialog-box t])

which is a bit useless since XEmacs already has a dialog box interface. Ho hum.

xgetfile comes in many Linux distributions, in a package mysteriously called "multimedia".

Useful UK/Europe Emacs Links

The GNU Emacs FAQ : A version of the GNU Emacs frequently asked questions list stored in Oxford. Not really HTML, mainly plain text, but who cares?
The GNU Emacs Manual : Is probably built into to your copy of emacs. Try M-x info. If it isn't try this copy in Southampton.
The Gnus FAQ, which is stored locally, is the online guide to the Emacs newsreader, gnus.
The GNU Emacs Common Lisp Reference : For documenting the common lisp extensions to Emacs, the good burghers of Southampton come through again.
Those writing extensions to emacs are directed to Jari Aalto's web pages on emacs packages.

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