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From: johnf@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu (John Flanagan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: any luck with gnu-emacs?
Message-ID: <1990Aug30.211302.29922@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 30 Aug 90 21:13:02 GMT
References: <14764@wpi.wpi.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <14764@wpi.wpi.edu> pawn@wpi.wpi.edu (Kevin Goroway) writes:
>Has anyone had any luck with the gnu-emacs on abcfd20?
>Even the gnu-lisp file doesn't unarchive correctly...
>A full blown gnu-emacs port would be a wonderful thing.

Use lharc 1.0 on a Unix system.  It does work, but it uses termcap to
get your terminal's characteristics (just like unix emacs), so you
have to do a couple of special things.  One is to put a "termcap" file
in your s: directory, with one of the Amiga termcap definitions in it that
are floating around for use with dnet.  The other thing you need to do
is set the environment variable TERM to "amiga" (or whatever you call 
your terminal definition in the termcap file).  Unfortunately, this emacs
does not use standard ENV: variables, but seems to use the Manx variety.
This is annoying, but can be worked around if you use the ARP shell -- 
just type "set TERM=amiga."  

It is thrilling to see full-blown emacs running on the Amiga,
but since it is still beta and missing a lot of features, it is not
yet really any more useful than mg3beta4 (and somewhat less so if you 
really value ARexx ports).  For one thing, it always opens a 23-line
window, regardless of what is set in the termcap entry.  For another,
it always opens a separate window;  if it is going to use termcap, it would
be nice if it could have the option to run in the shell window from which
it was called, thus opening up the way to use it over AUX:.  More seriously
for me, since it does not yet have shell hooks, you cannot do 'M-x shell' 
or 'M-x compile.'

On the bright side, it does have the kill ring (for recursive undo), 
rectangle operations, and the other basic features which set it apart
from mg.  I look forward to the planned improvements listed in the doc file,
and appreciate the effort being put into the port.  This is going to
be one great editing environment to have at home.

--John







John Flanagan				Center for EUV Astrophysics
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(...!ucbvax!soc1.ssl!johnf)		Berkeley, CA 94720
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