Emacs

This command is run in the standard Linux environment via the Terminal Activity. The GUI will probably not integrate comfortably with the XO Laptop's Sugar environment. Your user experience may vary considerably depending on the established environment and the other programs running on the laptop, may need re-installation after an OS Update. See the Linux software category for other commands.

• This page collects information on working with Emacs specifically on the XO.
• Emacs is an extensible text-editor, customizable through Emacs Lisp
• It runs from the terminal, not from within the Sugar desktop, so is mainly of use to developers.
• For general Emacs information, please see http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs or http://www.emacswiki.org/

How do I install Emacs?

Easy

enter the Terminal_Activity and type

su
yum install emacs

as found here

CVS - This adds support for XFT fonts which allows emacs to run in it's own window

You need about 400 MB free for this; if you use SD/USB memory card/stick, you only need about 60MB free. NOTE: USB key must be Ext NOT Fat because Fat doesn't support the long filenames used in emacs cvs source dir.

 sudo yum install texinfo gcc make cvs gtk2-devel libXpm-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel libungif-devel libtiff-devel
 #cd to SD or USB key and do su if you are using external storage.
 sudo cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
 cd emacs
 ./configure --with-x-toolkit --with-xft
 make bootstrap
 make
 sudo make install

 #Edit .Xresources:
 sudo nano ~/.Xresources
 #add to end of file:
 #emacs.FontBackend: xft
 #save

Alternately, you can install the YUM repository hosted by Chip Coldwell, Redhat’s Emacs maintainer, and then update from there.

 rpm -ivh http://people.redhat.com/coldwell/emacs/repo/fedora/emacs-release-23-1.fc8.noarch.rpm
 yum update emacs

More notes on this version are available at the EmacsWiki.

Running Emacs

If installed with yum

Since Emacs was installed from the terminal, and not as an activity, it must be started from the terminal.

emacs -nw

will start Emacs in text mode. You can skip the -nw parameter to start in windowed mode, but the bit-map fonts are difficult to read on the native XO screen.

"Font is not defined" error

If you can't start Emacs in windowed mode and get an error saying "Font `-adobe-courier-medium-r-*-*-12-120-75-75-*-*-*-*' is not defined" you can fix that by editing the file /usr/share/X11/app-defaults/Emacs. Remove the line with the font name.

If installed with CVS

You can run emacs normally with the

 emacs

command.

Keybindings

Certain key-combinations are reserved by Sugar. Almost all of the function keys, and others. See Keyboard_Shortcuts for more.

Instructions for re-mapping, or alternatives can be found at http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=1449.0

If a <Ctrl-key> combination is reserved, pressing <Esc-Esc key> (not a key-chord, but Escape twice, followed by the key) should work.

Info and other documentation

If you installed via Yum, Info pages are excluded by default.

For any packages or utilities you install, you may need to manually add their info files to the Infopath.

This may also extend to the "raw" elisp files in the basic package -- there are no .el files in /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/ -- all I can find are .elc files -- OtherMichael 01:46, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Python mode

• http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PythonMode
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/python-mode/
• http://thegrout.blogspot.com/2008/03/emacs-python-cheatsheet.html

Alternatives

• see TextEditor

See Also

• LISP
• http://www.timthelion.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/emacs-olpc.writeback - basic installation notes, plus configuration files to use Emacs in the ebook mode