I have decided (May 2005) to make the switch from XEmacs to Emacs. I
realized that the main reason that I was still using XEmacs was no
longer relevant. This was the support for running gnuclient in a ssh
terminal terminal window to connect to a running graphical XEmacs. A
few years ago I used to do this all the time to connect to my office
desktop machine from home over a modem (no need to sync files between
home and office, especially handy for mail). However, now I use my
laptop for everything so it is not necessary any more.
I first tried the current stable release of Emacs (21.3). With a very
little work it was possible to get it behaving more-or-less like
XEmacs. The big improvement with Emacs is that is far zippier than
XEmacs. For example, loading my directory ~/BobKPNO/ in dired takes
less than 5 seconds, as opposed to nearly 10 seconds in XEmacs (there
are nearly 8000 files and subdirs in the directory). The main problem
is that many of the add-on packages that I am used to in XEmacs are
not installed by default and there is no package management system to
make this easier. Notable omissions that I use every day are AUCTeX,
calc, and tramp. AUCTeX is easily dealt with since there is an RPM for
Fedora (which is actually better than an emacs-specific package
system, or at least it would be if it were included in a package
repository). With calc, on the other hand, I couldn't get it to
install for 21.3, even after applying the recommended
patches. However, after reading that calc is now being maintained
again in the main Emacs CVS tree I decided to throw caution to the
wind...
Now I have compiled up the latest CVS version (22.0.50) and it seems
vastly improved over 21.3. I still haven't read all of the NEWS file
(it is rather long!) but I've already found loads of nice
little features. For example, there is now a key binding for
goto-line (M-g M-g). In XEmacs this was just M-g but I might as
well learn the new version. Also, both calc and tramp are bundled in
and work flawlessly out ofthe box. Time to update my configuration
files to work with 22.
I also remembered that Jonathan Corbet wrote about the CVS emacs in
LWN a couple of months ago. Some interesting tips in the comments (in
among all the raking over of old XEmacs/RMS disputes). In particular
that there is a branch of Emacs that supports the multi-tty thang.
Also that I should set x-select-enable-clipboard to t to get
inter-application cut/paste working like in XEmacs.
Version 22 allows you to use a directory emacs.d/ to store .emacs
and the like (somewhat like the .xemacs/ directory) but I don't
think I'll bother for now.
Lots of packages need installing separately. I am downloading the tar
balls or CVS trees to ~/emacs/pkg-src/ and installing them all in
~/emacs/{lisp,info,etc}/
This is installed and I have copied over my customizations from XEmacs. Still to do is to redo my configuration completely. I want to split it up into sub-wikis for science, code, personal, etc. Would be nice to have a blog too and maybe use planner.
Installed. Not much call for it at the moment unless I start using gnus again.
Installed.
This contains semantic, speedbar, and other tools for programming languages. It is a prerequisite for ecb.
Installed. Lots of new icons.
Emacs Code Browser. Sort of like an IDE. Has a Function/Class/Method browser and a History window, which are quite useful. Also has Directory browser, which I find unusable since it hangs on directories with lots of files (order 10000).
Installed. Still need to test this.
Mode for editing XML files. Reputedly better than PSGML mode.
Installed. Tested - works fine.
Interface to w3m text-mode browser.
Installed.
Not sure whose fault this is but I have a strange interaction between
Auctex and the rest of emacs. Emacs contains a file syntax.el that
is required by font-lock.el. However, there is also a syntax.el in
the auctex/autoload directory that seems to be lisp files generated
automatically to give support for latex style files. Unfortunately,
the auctex directory is first in the load path so emacs loads the
wrong file and complains. Solved for the time being by doing
touch /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/auctex/auto/.nosearch
but this is not an ideal solution.
~/BobKPNO/ takes over 7 minutes!
mouse-copy is a pretty good approximation to the whole C-mouse
stuff in XEmacs. However, it is annoying that it leaves the
secondary selection active (big yellow blotch).
Info-default-directory-list
seems to have no effect. This is because there is no dir file
there. Do I have to generate this by hand? In XEmacs it gets
generated automatically. Aha, it turns out there is a shell command
install-info that does this.