SXEmacs Internals Manual

• A History of Emacs: Times, dates, important events.
• SXEmacs From the Outside: A broad conceptual overview.
• The Lisp Language: An overview.
• SXEmacs From the Perspective of Building
• SXEmacs From the Inside
• The SXEmacs Object System (Abstractly Speaking)
• How Lisp Objects Are Represented in C
• Rules When Writing New C Code
• Regression Testing SXEmacs
• A Summary of the Various SXEmacs Modules
• Allocation of Objects in SXEmacs Lisp
• Dumping
• Events and the Event Loop
• Asynchronous Events; Quit Checking
• Evaluation; Stack Frames; Bindings
• Symbols and Variables
• Buffers and Textual Representation
• MULE Character Sets and Encodings
• The Lisp Reader and Compiler
• Lstreams
• Consoles; Devices; Frames; Windows
• The Redisplay Mechanism
• Extents
• Faces
• Glyphs
• Specifiers
• Menus
• Subprocesses
• Interface to the X Window System
• Categories: A categorial approach to access objects
• Index

--- The Detailed Node Listing ---

A History of Emacs

• Through Version 18: Unification prevails.
• Lucid Emacs: One version 19 Emacs.
• GNU Emacs 19: The other version 19 Emacs.
• GNU Emacs 20: The other version 20 Emacs.
• XEmacs: The continuation of Lucid Emacs.

Rules When Writing New C Code

• General Coding Rules
• Writing Lisp Primitives
• Adding Global Lisp Variables
• Coding for Mule
• Techniques for SXEmacs Developers

Coding for Mule

• Character-Related Data Types
• Working With Character and Byte Positions
• Conversion to and from External Data
• General Guidelines for Writing Mule-Aware Code
• An Example of Mule-Aware Code

Regression Testing SXEmacs

A Summary of the Various SXEmacs Modules

• Low-Level Modules
• Basic Lisp Modules
• Modules for Standard Editing Operations
• Modules for the Basic Displayable Lisp Objects
• Modules for other Display-Related Lisp Objects
• Modules for the Redisplay Mechanism
• Modules for Interfacing with the File System
• Modules for Other Aspects of the Lisp Interpreter and Object System
• Modules for Interfacing with the Operating System
• Modules for Interfacing with X Windows
• Modules for Internationalization
• Modules for Regression Testing

Allocation of Objects in SXEmacs Lisp

• Introduction to Allocation
• Garbage Collection
• GCPROing
• Garbage Collection - Step by Step
• Integers and Characters
• Allocation from Frob Blocks
• lrecords
• Low-level allocation
• Cons
• Vector
• Bit Vector
• Symbol
• Marker
• String
• Compiled Function

Garbage Collection - Step by Step

• Invocation
• garbage_collect_1
• mark_object
• gc_sweep
• sweep_lcrecords_1
• compact_string_chars
• sweep_strings
• sweep_bit_vectors_1

Dumping

• Overview
• Data descriptions
• Dumping phase
• Reloading phase

Dumping phase

• Object inventory
• Address allocation
• The header
• Data dumping
• Pointers dumping

Events and the Event Loop

• Introduction to Events
• Main Loop
• Specifics of the Event Gathering Mechanism
• Specifics About the Emacs Event
• Event Queues
• Event Stream Callback Routines
• Other Event Loop Functions
• Stream Pairs
• Converting Events
• Dispatching Events; The Command Builder
• Focus Handling
• Editor-Level Control Flow Modules

Asynchronous Events; Quit Checking

• Signal Handling
• Control-G (Quit) Checking
• Profiling
• Asynchronous Timeouts
• Exiting

Evaluation; Stack Frames; Bindings

• Evaluation
• Dynamic Binding; The specbinding Stack; Unwind-Protects
• Simple Special Forms
• Catch and Throw

Symbols and Variables

• Introduction to Symbols
• Obarrays
• Symbol Values

Buffers and Textual Representation

• Introduction to Buffers: A buffer holds a block of text such as a file.
• The Text in a Buffer: Representation of the text in a buffer.
• Buffer Lists: Keeping track of all buffers.
• Markers and Extents: Tagging locations within a buffer.
• Bufbytes and Emchars: Representation of individual characters.
• The Buffer Object: The Lisp object corresponding to a buffer.

MULE Character Sets and Encodings

• Character Sets
• Encodings
• Internal Mule Encodings
• CCL

Encodings

• Japanese EUC (Extended Unix Code)
• JIS7

Internal Mule Encodings

• Internal String Encoding
• Internal Character Encoding

Lstreams

• Creating an Lstream: Creating an lstream object.
• Lstream Types: Different sorts of things that are streamed.
• Lstream Functions: Functions for working with lstreams.
• Lstream Methods: Creating new lstream types.

Consoles; Devices; Frames; Windows

• Introduction to Consoles; Devices; Frames; Windows
• Point
• Window Hierarchy
• The Window Object

The Redisplay Mechanism

• Critical Redisplay Sections
• Line Start Cache
• Redisplay Piece by Piece

Extents

• Introduction to Extents: Extents are ranges over text, with properties.
• Extent Ordering: How extents are ordered internally.
• Format of the Extent Info: The extent information in a buffer or string.
• Zero-Length Extents: A weird special case.
• Mathematics of Extent Ordering: A rigorous foundation.
• Extent Fragments: Cached information useful for redisplay.

Categories

• Dllists
• Skiplists