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From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Early experience with MicroEMACS 3.9
Message-ID: <6867@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 31-Jul-87 12:31:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.6867
Posted: Fri Jul 31 12:31:33 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Aug-87 10:08:29 EDT
Organization: GE Corp. R & D, Schenectady,NY
Lines: 50
Keywords: memacs


A few words about the new features, documentation, and bugs in memacs
3.9. There are several new features, most notably a new "autosave" mode
and at least one new macro operator which seems to be documented only in
the source code (&env, returns the value of an environment variable).
There is code for named-procedures, looks like macros, but I haven't
found any documentation on this. I looked in the index under 'named' and
'procedures,' and scanned the manual, but I haven't gotten my hardcopy
back yet. The standard keyscanner has the code added for recognizing
ANSI keyboard code (start with ESC-[), but they're not in a conditional,
so you're out of luck if you bound ESC-[ to a function.

There is a spelling checked (MicroSPELL) included, and I haven't really
had a chance to check it out. I did find 31 spelling errors in the EMACS
document, but it may not have been thru the checker. I'm mailing the
fixes to the author.

Several gotcha's, one small and one (for me) huge. The nice ACMODE flag
in the source is gone. The editor enters CMODE whenever a .c or .h file
is opened. There is some was to disable this (it's either in a macro, or
a macro is called every time a file is opened so you can reset the mode)
but it is not obvious in either the source code or documentation. I
finally bound a key to "disable CMODE".

The big problem I had was that input from files and keyboard is handled
in a slightly different way.  When doing bindings from the .emacsrc
file, all of the functions are assumed to be upper case, with a comment
indicating that this is true in DOS.  My rc file bound "next-line" to
FNB (the down arrow) and to FBb (Shift F4) a macro which undoes changes
to a buffer by marking it as unmodified, then reading the original file
back in. 

They were in the wrong order in the file, and after about a half hour of
editing, I pressed the "cursor down" for the first time and lost
everything I'd typed. The code to force functions is in bind.c, and I
have taken it out of my version, since DOS already seems to do what I
want without it.

In spite of comments in the code indicating that it should be smaller,
it wasn't under Xenix, using all the features. It may be faster, but not
blindingly so. I just got the function keys working on my hacked 3.8i
when 3.9 arrived, so I wrote a few more macros to use the new features.

I hope this helps people getting started on 3.9, and when I find out how
to kill automatic CMODE I'll post. Copies of all changes have been
posted to the author.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {chinet | philabs | sesimo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me