Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!eagle!icdoc!doc.ic.ac.uk!iwm
From: iwm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Moor)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Using the dribble file?
Message-ID: <250@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Date: 6 Apr 88 13:02:27 GMT
Sender: news@doc.ic.ac.uk
Reply-To: iwm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Moor)
Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.
Lines: 28


For those people who have missed the references in the GNU emacs manual,
the dribble file is a record of every single keystroke, created by
open-dribble-file. I think it is mainly intended for debugging purposes.

When I edit a large file (thousands of lines), I find the  pauses as the
autosave file is written annoyingly long, not to mention the extra disk space
required, but I dont want to turn off autosave for the obvious reason. 
The VMS editors EDT and EVE don't save the file periodically but record 
keystrokes, recovery consists of replaying the session and then reading from
the terminal (its quite fun to watch the editor working away by itself).
There are disadvantages to this method, you must still have the orignal file,
the screen/window must be the same size as in the orignal session, and 
running commands that change other files in subprocesses may cause problems.

What I would like to know is - is there a command for replaying a file of
keystrokes or perhaps for converting it to a file of lisp that can be obeyed
(the latter would certainly be easier to modify) ?

Ian W Moor
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