XEmacs FAQ

Frequently asked questions about XEmacs

Last Modified: 1995/08/29

Anthony Rossini <arossini@biostats.hmc.psu.edu>

Ben Wing <wing@netcom.com>

Chuck Thompson <cthomp@cs.uiuc.edu>

1. Introductory Questions
- 1.1. Preface
- 1.2. What is XEmacs?
- 1.3. What is the current version of XEmacs?
- 1.4. Where can I find it?
- 1.5. Why Another Version of Emacs?
- 1.6. What do M-x, GNU, etc. mean?
- 1.7. Where can I get help for using XEmacs?
- 1.8. Where is the mailing list archived?
- 1.9. What is InfoDock, how does it relate to XEmacs, and how can I obtain it?
2. Compiling XEmacs
- 2.1. What is the best way to compile XEmacs with the netaudio system, since I have got the netaudio system compiled but installed at a weird place, I am not root. Also in the READMEs it does not say anything about compiling with the audioserver?
3. Problems running XEmacs / weird messages
- 3.1. Help! XEmacs just crashed on me!
- 3.2. When I try to use some particular option of some particular package, I get a cryptic error in the minibuffer.
- 3.3. I get tons of translation table syntax error messages during startup. How do I get rid of them?
- 3.4. How can I avoid the startup warnings about deducing proper fonts?
- 3.5. Help! I can not get XEmacs to display on my Envizex X-terminal!
- 3.6. Why do I get weird messages about giftoppm and ppmdither not being found?
- 3.7. How can I avoid those messages about deleting excess backup files?
- 3.8. Help! XEmacs just locked up my X server on my Linux box!
4. Customization -- Emacs Lisp and the .emacs file
- 4.1. How can `.emacs' determine which of the family of Emacsen I am using?
- 4.2. How can I detect a color display?
- 4.3. How can I evaluate Emacs-Lisp expressions without switching to the *scratch* buffer?
- 4.4. If you put (setq tab-width 6) in your `.emacs' file it does not work! Is there a reason for this. If you do it at the EVAL prompt it works fine!! How strange.
- 4.5. How can I add directories to the load-path?
- 4.6. How to check if a lisp function is defined or not?
- 4.7. Can I force the output of (face-list) to a buffer other than the minibuffer since it is too wide to fit?
5. Customization -- X resources
- 5.1. Where is a list of X resources?
6. Changing textual fonts and colors
- 6.1. How do I set the text, menu and modeline fonts?
- 6.2. How can I set the background/foreground colors when highlighting a region?
- 6.3. How can I set the most commonly used color options from my `.emacs' instead of from my `.Xdefaults'?
7. The modeline
- 7.1. How can I make the modeline go away?
- 7.2. How do you have XEmacs display the line number in the modeline?
- 7.3. How do I get XEmacs to put the time of day on the modeline?
- 7.4. How can one change the color of the modeline based on the mode used? i.e. red for C mode, green for TeX mode etc.?
8. The keyboard
- 8.1. What is the difference in in key sequences between XEmacs and GNU Emacs?
- 8.2. How can I make XEmacs recognize the Alt key of my HP workstation as a Meta key?
- 8.3. How can I stop the down-arrow-key from adding empty lines at the bottom of my buffers?
- 8.4. I wonder if there is an interactive function that can generate "fake" keyboard events. This way, I could simply map them inside XEmacs.
- 8.5. I am trying to bind C-. to scroll up by one line and C-; to scroll down by one line...
- 8.6. I cannot manage to globally bind my Delete key to something other than the default. How does one do this?
- 8.7. How can I bind complex functions (or macros) to keys?
- 8.8. Can the cursor keys scroll the screen a line at a time, rather than the default half page jump? I tend it to find it disorienting.
- 8.9. How to map "Help" key alone on Sun type4 keyboard?
- 8.10. How can you type in special characters in XEmacs?
9. The cursor
- 9.1. Is there a way to make the bar cursor a little thicker than one-pixel thick since I lose it?
- 9.2. On the same subject -- is there a way to get back the old "block" cursor where the cursor covers the character in front of the point?
10. The mouse; cutting and pasting
- 10.1. I keep hitting the middle mouse button by accident and getting stuff pasted into my buffer so how can I turn this off?
- 10.2. How do I set control/meta/etc modifiers on mouse buttons?
- 10.3. I do "^x ^b" to get a list of buffers and the entries get highlighted when I move the mouse over them but clicking the left mouse does not do anything.
- 10.4. How can I get a list of buffers to popup when I hit button 3 on the mouse?
- 10.5. Why does cut-and-paste not work between XEmacs and a cmdtool?
- 10.6. How I can set XEmacs up so that it pastes where the cursor is _not_ where the pointer lies?
- 10.7. How do I select a rectangular region?
- 10.8. Why does M-w take so long?
11. Highlighting
- 11.1. How can I highlight selections?
- 11.2. How do I get a pending-delete type of behavior?
- 11.3. I do not like my text highlighted while I am doing isearch as I am not able to see whats underneath. How do I turn it off?
- 11.4. The text gets highlighted when I do C-x C-p (mark-page). Is there a way to turn this feature off?
12. The menubar and toolbar
- 12.1. How do I get rid of the menu (or menubar) ?
- 12.2. Can I customize the basic menubar?
- 12.3. What controls how many buffers are listed in the menu "Buffers" list?
- 12.4. I am trying to use a resource like Emacs*menubar*font to set the font of the menubar but it's not working.
13. Scrollbars
- 13.1. How can I disable the scrollbar?
- 13.2. How can one use resources to change scrollbar colors?
- 13.3. When I move the scrollbar in an XEmacs window, it moves the point as well, which should not be the default behavior. Is this a bug or a feature? Can I disable it?
14. Frame Geometry
- 14.1. In Lucid Emacs 19.6 I did (set-screen-width characters) and (set-screen-height lines) in my `.emacs' instead of specifying `Emacs*EmacsScreen.geometry' in my `.Xdefaults' but this does not work in XEmacs 19.13.
- 14.2. In XEmacs 19.11 I specified `Emacs*EmacsScreen.geometry' in my `.emacs' but this does not work in XEmacs 19.13.
15. Window/icon title; window manager problems
- 15.1. How can I get the icon to just say `XEmacs' and not include the name of the current file in it?
- 15.2. How can I have the window title area display the full directory/name of the current buffer file and not just the name?
- 15.3. When I run `xterm -name junk' I get an xterm whose class name according to xprop, is `junk'. This is the way it's supposed to work, I think. When I run `xemacs -name junk' the class name is not set to `junk'. It's still `emacs'. What does `xemacs -name' really do? The reason I ask is that my window manager (fvwm) will make a window sticky and I use XEmacs to read my mail. I want that XEmacs window to be sticky, without having to use the window manager's function to set the window sticky. What gives?
16. Editing source code (C mode; Lisp mode; etc.)
- 16.1. How can I do source code highlighting using font-lock?
- 16.2. How do you arrange it so that XEmacs indents all the clauses of a Common Lisp if the same amount instead of indenting the 3rd clause differently from the first two?
- 16.3. I do not like cc-mode. How do I use the old c-mode?
- 16.4. When I try to edit a postscript file it gets stuck saying: fontifying 'filename' (regexps....) and it just sits there. If I press ctrl-c in the window where XEmacs was started, it suddenly becomes alive again.
- 16.5. Does anyone know how to get the "More" Syntax Highlighting on by default?
17. Text mode
- 17.1. How can I enable auto-indent?
- 17.2. How can I get XEmacs to come up in text mode (auto-fill) by default?
18. Shell mode
- 18.1. How do I start up a second shell buffer?
- 18.2. I'm using the Emacs M-x shell function, and I would like to invoke and use a telnet session within it. Everything works fine except that now all ^M's are filtered out by Emacs. Fixes?
- 18.3. If I type a very long command line (like a compile command) into a shell buffer, the output seems to be messed up.
19. Mail; VM; GNUS; BBDB; and related
- 19.1. How and where I am suppose to set the face attributes for customizing the appearance of messages (i.e. for VM)?
- 19.2. I seem to have heard that there's a package distributed with XEmacs which will use the echo area to notify you of incoming mail in a rather configurable way (multiple spool files, different actions for different files). What and where is it?
- 19.3. Is there any way to add more faces and regexps to GNUS without hacking gnus.el?
- 19.4. What is BBDB?
- 19.5. I noticed that BBDB evokes an XEmacs bug; is there a fix?
- 19.6. I'm getting the error 'Wrong type argument: listp :-pos' when I try to start BBDB. What do I do?
- 19.7. I'm getting the error 'movemail: Permission denied' when I try and start VM. What do I do?
20. Printing
- 20.1. Font-lock looks nice. How can I print (WYSIWYG) the highlighted document?
- 20.2. My printer is a Postscript printer and lpr only works for Postscript files, so how do I get M-x lpr-region and M-x lpr-buffer to work?
21. Gnuserv
- 21.1. How do I disable gnuserv from opening a new frame?
- 21.2. What do I do to start the gnuserv server so that each subseqeuent XEmacs is a client?
22. Miscellaneous
- 22.1. How do I specify the paths that XEmacs uses for finding files?
- 22.2. Why does edt emulation not work?
- 22.3. How can I emulate VI and use it as my default mode?
- 22.4. Is there some way to get the behavior so that if the current buffer has a file associated with it, the current buffer will use that files name else use the buffer name?
- 22.5. I have no idea where this is coming from, but ever since I moved from 19.9 to 19.13 I have started seeing that all of my buffers will get a minor mode called `Omit'. I have no idea how it got there nor do I know what it does. What is it?
- 22.6. How do I turn off the sound?
- 22.7. Can I have the end of the buffer delimited in some way? Say, with: [END] ?
- 22.8. Can I insert today's date into buffer?
- 22.9. Are only certain syntactic character classes available for abbrevs? I didn't see any restrictions in the info.
- 22.10. Filladapt used to work after I loaded it. Now in 19.13 it doesn't. What gives?