Frequently asked questions about SXEmacs

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SXEmacs FAQ

This is the guide to the SXEmacs Frequently Asked Questions list—a compendium of questions and answers pertaining to one of the finest programs ever written. SXEmacs is much more than just a Text Editor.

SXEmacs Note: Currently, this is the FAQ from XEmacs. It will be overhauled and updated in the very near future. If you are reading this note, please remind us to do so.

This FAQ is freely redistributable. 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.

In the near future this assortment of questions will be automatically generated from a database. We are currently evaluating the design specifications, a general classification and technical necessities.

• Introduction:  Introduction, Policy, Credits.
• Installation:  Installation and Trouble Shooting.
• Customisation:  Customisation and Options.
• Subsystems:  Major Subsystems.
• Miscellaneous:  The Miscellaneous Stuff.
• MS Windows:  SXEmacs on Microsoft Windows.
• Current Events:  What the Future Holds. 
 — The Detailed Node Listing —

Introduction, Policy, Credits


• Q1.0.1:  What is SXEmacs?



• Q1.0.2:  What is the current version of SXEmacs?



• Q1.0.3:  Where can I find it?



• Q1.0.4:  Why another version of Emacs?



• Q1.0.5:  Why haven’t XEmacs/SXEmacs and GNU Emacs merged?



• Q1.0.6:  Where can I get help?



• Q1.0.7:  Where are the mailing lists archived?



• Q1.0.8:  How do you pronounce SXEmacs?



• Q1.0.9:  What does SXEmacs look like?



• Q1.0.10:  Is there a port of SXEmacs to Microsoft (’95 or NT)?



• Q1.0.11:  Is there a port of SXEmacs to the Macintosh?



• Q1.0.12:  Is there a port of SXEmacs to NextStep?



• Q1.0.13:  Is there a port of SXEmacs to OS/2?



• Q1.0.14:  Where can I get a printed copy of the SXEmacs users manual?



Policies:

• Q1.1.1:  What is the FAQ editorial policy?



• Q1.1.2:  How do I become a beta tester?



• Q1.1.3:  How do I contribute to SXEmacs itself?



Credits:

• Q1.2.1:  Who wrote XEmacs? Who wrote SXEmacs?



• Q1.2.2:  Who contributed to this version of the FAQ?



• Q1.2.3:  Who contributed to the FAQ in the past?



Internationalisation:

• Q1.3.1:  What is the status of internationalisation support aka MULE (including Asian language support?



• Q1.3.2:  How can I help with internationalisation?



• Q1.3.3:  How do I type non-ASCII characters?



• Q1.3.4:  Can SXEmacs messages come out in a different language?



• Q1.3.5:  Please explain the various input methods in MULE/SXEmacs



• Q1.3.6:  How do I portably code for MULE/XEmacs/SXEmacs?



• Q1.3.7:  How about Cyrillic Modes?



• Q1.3.8:  Does SXEmacs support Unicode?



• Q1.3.9:  How does SXEmacs display Unicode?



Getting Started:

• Q1.4.1:  What is an init.el or .emacs and is there a sample one?



• Q1.4.2:  Can I use the same init.el/.emacs with other Emacsen?



• Q1.4.3:  Any good SXEmacs tutorials around?



• Q1.4.4:  May I see an example of a useful SXEmacs Lisp function?



• Q1.4.5:  And how do I bind it to a key?



• Q1.4.6:  What’s the difference between a macro and a function?



Installation and Trouble Shooting


• Q2.0.1:  Running SXEmacs without installing.



• Q2.0.2:  SXEmacs is too big.



• Q2.0.3:  Compiling SXEmacs with Netaudio. 


• Q2.0.4:  Problems with Linux and ncurses.



• Q2.0.5:  Do I need X11 to run SXEmacs?



• Q2.0.6:  I’m having strange crashes.  What do I do?



• Q2.0.7:  Libraries in non-standard locations.



• Q2.0.8:  can’t resolve symbol _h_errno



• Q2.0.9:  Where do I find external libraries?



• Q2.0.10:  After I run configure I find a coredump, is something wrong?



• Q2.0.11:  SXEmacs can’t resolve host names.



• Q2.0.12:  Why can’t I strip SXEmacs?



• Q2.0.13:  I don’t need no steenkin’ packages.  Do I?



• Q2.0.14:  How do I figure out which packages to install?



• Q2.0.15:  EFS fails with "500 AUTH not understood" (NEW)



Trouble Shooting:

• Q2.1.1:  SXEmacs just crashed on me!



• Q2.1.2:  Cryptic Minibuffer messages.



• Q2.1.3:  Translation Table Syntax messages at Startup.



• Q2.1.4:  Startup warnings about deducing proper fonts?



• Q2.1.5:  SXEmacs cannot connect to my X Terminal.



• Q2.1.6:  SXEmacs just locked up my Linux X server.



• Q2.1.7:  HP Alt key as Meta.



• Q2.1.8:  got (wrong-type-argument color-instance-p nil)!



• Q2.1.9:  SXEmacs causes my OpenWindows 3.0 server to crash.



• Q2.1.10:  Warnings from incorrect key modifiers.



• Q2.1.11:  Can’t instantiate image error... in toolbar



• Q2.1.12:  Regular Expression Problems on DEC OSF1.



• Q2.1.13:  HP/UX 10.10 and create_process failure



• Q2.1.14:  C-g doesn’t work for me.  Is it broken?



• Q2.1.15:  How to debug a SXEmacs problem with a debugger.



• Q2.1.16:  SXEmacs crashes in strcat on HP/UX 10.



• Q2.1.17:  ‘Marker does not point anywhere’.



• Q2.1.18:  SXEmacs is outputting lots of X errors.



• Q2.1.19:  SXEmacs does not follow the local timezone.



• Q2.1.20:  ‘Symbol's function definition is void: hkey-help-show.’



• Q2.1.21:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q2.1.22:  SXEmacs seems to take a really long time to do some things.



• Q2.1.23:  Movemail on Linux does not work for SXEmacs.



• Q2.1.24:  SXEmacs won’t start without network.



• Q2.1.25:  After upgrading, SXEmacs won’t do ‘foo’ any more!



Customisation and Options


• Q3.0.1:  What version of Emacs am I running?



• Q3.0.2:  How do I evaluate Elisp expressions?



• Q3.0.3:  (setq tab-width 6) behaves oddly.



• Q3.0.4:  How can I add directories to the load-path?



• Q3.0.5:  How to check if a lisp function is defined?



• Q3.0.6:  Can I force the output of (face-list) to a buffer?



• Q3.0.7:  Font selections don’t get saved after Save Options.



• Q3.0.8:  How do I make a single minibuffer frame?



• Q3.0.9:  What is Customize?



X Window System & Resources:

• Q3.1.1:  Where is a list of X resources?



• Q3.1.2:  How can I detect a color display?



• Q3.1.3:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q3.1.4:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q3.1.5:  How can I get the icon to just say ‘SXEmacs’?



• Q3.1.6:  How can I have the window title area display the full path?



• Q3.1.7:  ‘sxemacs -name junk’ doesn’t work?



• Q3.1.8:  ‘-iconic’ doesn’t work.



Textual Fonts & Colors:

• Q3.2.1:  How can I set color options from init.el?



• Q3.2.2:  How do I set the text, menu and modeline fonts?



• Q3.2.3:  How can I set the colors when highlighting a region?



• Q3.2.4:  How can I limit color map usage?



• Q3.2.5:  My tty supports color, but SXEmacs doesn’t use them.



• Q3.2.6:  Can I have pixmap backgrounds in SXEmacs?



• Q3.2.7:  How do I display non-ASCII characters?



The Modeline:

• Q3.3.1:  How can I make the modeline go away?



• Q3.3.2:  How do you have SXEmacs display the line number in the modeline?



• Q3.3.3:  How do I get SXEmacs to put the time of day on the modeline?



• Q3.3.4:  How do I turn off current chapter from AUC TeX modeline?



• Q3.3.5:  How can one change the modeline color based on the mode used?



Multiple Device Support:

• Q3.4.1:  How do I open a frame on another screen of my multi-headed display?



• Q3.4.2:  Can I really connect to a running SXEmacs after calling up over a modem?  How?



The Keyboard:

• Q3.5.1:  How can I bind complex functions (or macros) to keys?



• Q3.5.2:  How can I stop down-arrow from adding empty lines to the bottom of my buffers?



• Q3.5.3:  How do I bind C-. and C-; to scroll one line up and down?



• Q3.5.4:  Globally binding Delete?



• Q3.5.5:  Scrolling one line at a time.



• Q3.5.6:  How to map Help key alone on Sun type4 keyboard?



• Q3.5.7:  How can you type in special characters in SXEmacs?



• Q3.5.8:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q3.5.9:  How do I make the Delete key delete forward?



• Q3.5.10:  Can I turn on sticky modifier keys?



• Q3.5.11:  How do I map the arrow keys?



The Cursor:

• Q3.6.1:  Is there a way to make the bar cursor thicker?



• Q3.6.2:  Is there a way to get back the old block cursor where the cursor covers the character in front of the point?



• Q3.6.3:  Can I make the cursor blink?



The Mouse and Highlighting:

• Q3.7.1:  How can I turn off Mouse pasting?



• Q3.7.2:  How do I set control/meta/etc modifiers on mouse buttons?



• Q3.7.3:  Clicking the left button does not do anything in buffer list.



• Q3.7.4:  How can I get a list of buffers when I hit mouse button 3?



• Q3.7.5:  Why does cut-and-paste not work between SXEmacs and a cmdtool?



• Q3.7.6:  How I can set SXEmacs up so that it pastes where the text cursor is?



• Q3.7.7:  How do I select a rectangular region?



• Q3.7.8:  Why does M-w take so long?



The Menubar and Toolbar:

• Q3.8.1:  How do I get rid of the menu (or menubar)?



• Q3.8.2:  Can I customise the basic menubar?



• Q3.8.3:  How do I control how many buffers are listed in the menu Buffers list?



• Q3.8.4:  Resources like Emacs*menubar*font are not working?



• Q3.8.5:  How can I bind a key to a function to toggle the toolbar?



Scrollbars:

• Q3.9.1:  How can I disable the scrollbar?



• Q3.9.2:  How can one use resources to change scrollbar colors?



• Q3.9.3:  Moving the scrollbar can move the point; can I disable this?



• Q3.9.4:  How can I turn off automatic horizontal scrolling in specific modes?



Text Selections:

• Q3.10.1:  How can I turn off or change highlighted selections?



• Q3.10.2:  How do I get that typing on an active region removes it?



• Q3.10.3:  Can I turn off the highlight during isearch?



• Q3.10.4:  How do I turn off highlighting after C-x C-p (mark-page)?



• Q3.10.5:  The region disappears when I hit the end of buffer while scrolling.



• Q3.10.6:  Why is killing so slow?



Major Subsystems


• Q4.0.1:  How do I set up VM to retrieve remote mail using POP?



• Q4.0.2:  How do I get VM to filter mail for me?



• Q4.0.3:  How can I get VM to automatically check for new mail?



• Q4.0.4:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q4.0.5:  How do I get my outgoing mail archived?



• Q4.0.6:  I have various addresses at which I receive mail.  How can I
		  tell VM to ignore them when doing a "reply-all"?



• Q4.0.7:  Is there a mailing list or FAQ for VM?



• Q4.0.8:  Remote mail reading with VM.



• Q4.0.9:  rmail or VM gets an error incorporating new mail.



• Q4.0.10:  How do I make VM stay in a single frame?



• Q4.0.11:  How do I make VM or mh-e display graphical smilies?



• Q4.0.12:  Customisation of VM not covered in the manual or here.



Web browsing with W3:

• Q4.1.1:  What is W3?



• Q4.1.2:  How do I run W3 from behind a firewall?



• Q4.1.3:  Is it true that W3 supports style sheets and tables?



Reading Netnews and Mail with Gnus:

• Q4.2.1:  GNUS, (ding) Gnus, Gnus 5, September Gnus, Red Gnus,
		  Quassia Gnus, Pterodactyl Gnus, Oort Gnus, argh!



• Q4.2.2:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q4.2.3:  How do I make Gnus stay within a single frame?



• Q4.2.4:  How do I customize the From: line?



Other Mail & News:

• Q4.3.1:  How can I read and/or compose MIME messages?



• Q4.3.2:  What is TM and where do I get it?



• Q4.3.3:  Why isn’t this movemail program working?



• Q4.3.4:  Movemail is also distributed by Netscape?  Can that cause problems?



• Q4.3.5:  Where do I find pstogif (required by tm)?



Sparcworks, EOS, and WorkShop:

• Q4.4.1:  What is SPARCworks, EOS, and WorkShop



Energize:

• Q4.5.1:  What is/was Energize?



Infodock:

• Q4.6.1:  What is Infodock?



Other Unbundled Packages:

• Q4.7.1:  What is AUC TeX?  Where do you get it?



• Q4.7.2:  Are there any Emacs Lisp Spreadsheets?



• Q4.7.3:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q4.7.4:  Problems installing AUC TeX



• Q4.7.5:  Is there a reason for an Emacs package not to be included in SXEmacs?



• Q4.7.6:  Is there a MatLab mode?



• Q4.7.7:  Can I edit files on other hosts?



The Miscellaneous Stuff


• Q5.0.1:  How can I do source code highlighting using font-lock?



• Q5.0.2:  I do not like cc-mode.  How do I use the old c-mode?



• Q5.0.3:  How do I get ‘More’ Syntax Highlighting on by default?



• Q5.0.4:  How can I enable auto-indent and/or Filladapt?



• Q5.0.5:  How can I get SXEmacs to come up in text/auto-fill mode by default?



• Q5.0.6:  How do I start up a second shell buffer?



• Q5.0.7:  Telnet from shell filters too much.



• Q5.0.8:  Why does edt emulation not work?



• Q5.0.9:  How can I emulate VI and use it as my default mode?



• Q5.0.10:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q5.0.11:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q5.0.12:  How do I disable gnuserv from opening a new frame?



• Q5.0.13:  How do I start gnuserv so that each subsequent SXEmacs is a client?



• Q5.0.14:  Strange things are happening in Shell Mode.



• Q5.0.15:  Where do I get the latest CC Mode?



• Q5.0.16:  I find auto-show-mode disconcerting.  How do I turn it off?



• Q5.0.17:  How can I get two instances of info?



• Q5.0.18:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q5.0.19:  Is there something better than LaTeX mode?



• Q5.0.20:  Is there a way to start a new SXEmacs if there’s no
		  gnuserv running, and otherwise use gnuclient?



Emacs Lisp Programming Techniques:

• Q5.1.1:  The difference in key sequences between XEmacs/SXEmacs and GNU Emacs?



• Q5.1.2:  Can I generate "fake" keyboard events?



• Q5.1.3:  Could you explain read-kbd-macro in more detail?



• Q5.1.4:  What is the performance hit of let?



• Q5.1.5:  What is the recommended use of setq?



• Q5.1.6:  What is the typical misuse of setq ?



• Q5.1.7:  I like the do form of cl, does it slow things down?



• Q5.1.8:  I like recursion, does it slow things down?



• Q5.1.9:  How do I put a glyph as annotation in a buffer?



• Q5.1.10:  map-extents won’t traverse all of my extents!



• Q5.1.11:  My elisp program is horribly slow.  Is there an easy way to
		  find out where it spends time?



Sound:

• Q5.2.1:  How do I turn off the sound?



• Q5.2.2:  How do I get funky sounds instead of a boring beep?



• Q5.2.3:  What’s NAS, how do I get it?



• Q5.2.4:  Sunsite sounds don’t play.



Miscellaneous:

• Q5.3.1:  How do you make SXEmacs indent CL if-clauses correctly?



• Q5.3.2:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q5.3.3:  How can I print WYSIWYG a font-locked buffer?



• Q5.3.4:  Getting M-x lpr to work with postscript printer.



• Q5.3.5:  How do I specify the paths that SXEmacs uses for finding files?



• Q5.3.6:  [This question intentionally left blank]



• Q5.3.7:  Can I have the end of the buffer delimited in some way?



• Q5.3.8:  How do I insert today’s date into a buffer?



• Q5.3.9:  Are only certain syntactic character classes available for abbrevs?



• Q5.3.10:  How can I get those oh-so-neat X-Face lines?



• Q5.3.11:  How do I add new Info directories?



• Q5.3.12:  What do I need to change to make printing work?



SXEmacs on MS Windows

General Info:

• Q6.0.1:  Why did SXEmacs cut all support for Windows?



What the Future Holds


• Q7.0.1:  What new features will be in SXEmacs soon?



• Q7.0.2:  What’s new in SXEmacs 22.1.0?



• Q7.0.3:  What’s new in SXEmacs 22.1.1?



• Q7.0.4:  What’s new in SXEmacs 22.1.2?



• Q7.0.5:  What’s new in SXEmacs 22.1.3?



• Q7.0.6:  What’s new in SXEmacs 22.1.4?













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