GNU Emacs on Windows NT and Windows 95/98

Last modified: July 20, 1999

Table of Contents

(The date after an entry denotes the date of last edit.)

What is Emacs?

"Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. "

For a more detailed description, see the GNU pages at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html.

Which versions of NT and Win95/98 are supported?

This port is known to run on all versions of NT up to 4.0 (including with the beta Win95 shell) on all NT hardware platforms, and on Windows 95 beta version 347 and later versions. This port is built using the Win32 API and supports most of the features of the Unix version. (Note that this port does not work with Win32s, and I do not know enough about Win32s to know whether it is either possible or even worth trying.)

MSDOS and Windows 3.11

MULE/Meadow

Hisashi Miyashita <[email protected]> maintains MULE, multilingual Emacs, and its descendant; Meadow. You can get distributions of MULE at ftp://ftp.tokyonet.AD.JP/pub/windows/win32/mule-win32. With the multilingual support now merged into NTEmacs in 20.4, it is no longer necessary to use a special version of Emacs for other languages, but MULE users may find upgrading to Meadow easier than to NTEmacs because of slight differences in the way they handle fonts. Meadow also has a couple of features that are still missing from NTEmacs, such as support for native IMEs and the special keys on Japanese keyboards.

XEmacs

There are a couple of XEmacs for Windows NT/9X porting projects. See the XEmacs FAQ entry for more info, as well as Hrvoje Niksic's XEmacs on Windows FAQ.

MacOS

Where can I get general information about Emacs?

Emacs 20.4

The font specification string has been changed slightly to pass the tests that the fontset code puts it through. The dash on the end is no longer there, and the charset registry field now includes the first part of the charset (eg `iso8859'). `iso8859-1' replaces `ansi' as that is what the fontset code expects for latin1 fontsm and many more character sets are recognised. Every effort has been made to keep backwards compatibility, but it has not been possible in some places, so if you have any font related problems after upgrading to 20.4, you should update the font string (see the fonts section for details about how to find out the new font string).

For details on general changes to Emacs for 20.4, please see the NEWS file.

20.3 workarounds no longer required

The following code should be removed from your startup files if present:

Emacs 20.3

Emacs 20.3.1 contains a significant number of bug fixes and features not found in the 19.34.6 release, and is relatively stable (especially compared with the Emacs 20.2.1 release).

A significant change between 19.34.6 and 20 is the way in which end-of-line characters are handled. Emacs 20 has a general mechanism for detecting code systems used in files, and part of this mechanism detects end-of-line characters. I expect there to be unexpected surprises in the interaction between assumptions made by older packages and the new mechanism, so be aware.

I also highly recommend reading the help text for the function find-buffer-file-type-coding-system. Since this will be utterly impenetrable, I then suggest reading the Info pages on coding systems and end-of-line detection, and then taking a peak at f-b-f-t-c-s again.

Another very noticeable change between Emacs 19 and Emacs 20 is that all identifiers prefixed with "win32" have been changed to "w32". You should change references to these identifiers in your startup file and other lisp code to match this change.

VM

Unfortunately, VM has not been ported to Emacs 20 yet. If you are considering whether to move to Emacs 20 and you use VM, you will probably want to stick with 19.34.6 until VM has moved forward. (Bill Carpenter <[email protected]> on the question of VM and Emacs 20.)

c-mode-map and c-mode-base-map

The variable c-mode-map changed to c-mode-base-map from version 19.34 to version 20.1.

Upgrading from 19.34.6 to 20.3

Erwin Achermann <[email protected]> has graciously collected user experiences related to upgrading from 19.34.6 to 20.3.

Charles Curley <[email protected]> thoroughly reports the process he went through.

command.com shell on Win95/98

The latest end-of-line handling code in Emacs prevents command.com from being used as the interactive shell on Win95 out of the box. To use command.com as your shell, place the following in your startup file:

speedbar

The version of speedbar shipped with Emacs 20.3.1 has a bug preventing it from being used. If you have the JDE, you can use the version of speedbar.elc from there (either by modifying your load-path or copying it over into your lisp directory). If you don't have the JDE, the following version should work:

ftp://www.ultranet.com/pub/zappo/speedbar-0.8.tar.gz

sending mail generates the warning "unknown extension size ..."

If you are having difficulty printing from Emacs 20.3.1, see Andrew's note.

which-func-mode

If you set which-func-mode-global via customize, which-func-mode will not turn on automatically. You need to add the following to your startup file before the call to custom-set-variables:

More from Cristian Ionescu-Idbohrn <[email protected]> on which-func-mode.

runemacs.exe does not run, and temacs.exe does not dump

If you install the binary distribution and runemacs.exe does not run, and then you try the undump distribution or compiling from source and temacs.exe fails to dump correctly, then download the source distribution, apply this patch to src/w32heap.c, and recompile.

AUCTeX fails with buffer read-only

If AUCTeX fails with an error that the TeX output buffer is read-only, then you will want to apply this patch posted to dejanews.

igrep 2.82

igrep 2.82 needs to have the variable grep-null-device defined; add the following to your startup file:

lazy-lock

Emacs 20.3 has a bug in window-end which crops up in various places. One of them is in the lazy-lock package. If you use lazy-lock with Emacs 20.3 and are experiencing problems, try adding the following to your startup file before it loads lazy-lock:

David Koppelman <[email protected]> found that the above patch does not work for him, but he does find that setting lazy-lock-defer-on-scrolling to "t" does prevent the crashes.

Richard Stallman sent out this patch that fixes the bug in the C source. If you have the source, you can apply the patch and rebuild Emacs.

How do I get an Emacs distribution?

Emacs is distributed in two different forms. You can get the full source distribution of Emacs, or you can get an installed distribution of Emacs with all executables precompiled.

Where can I get the source distribution?

The latest source distribution can be found in ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/latest. It is distributed in two formats: one large gzipped tar file (emacs*.tar.gz), and a collection of smaller zip files that can be copied to 1.44 Mbyte floppies (em-src-_?.zip).

In the same directory you should also find patch files that enable you to upgrade source distributions to the latest version. These patch files are mirrors of the ones on the FSF server at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu.

You can also browse the source online; look in ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/latest for a directory named "emacs-<version>".

Where can I get precompiled versions?

If you do have trouble downloading the full distribution, try downloading it in the 1.44MB chunks, or try one of the mirror sites.

How do I unpack the distributions?

Open a command prompt (MSDOS) window. Decide on a directory in which to place Emacs. Move the distribution to that directory, and then unpack it. If you have the gzipped tar version, first use gunzip to uncompress the tar file, and then use tar with the "xvfm" flags to extract the files from the tar file:

(Note: Apparently the alpha version of gunzip cannot handle long file names, so you will need to rename the file to something like "emacstar.gz" before uncompressing it.)

The "-d" flag forces gunzip to decompress (its behavior depends upon the case of the name of the executable, and sometimes it doesn't recognize that it is really gunzip), and the "-c" flag tells it to pipe its output to stdout. Similarly, the "-" flag to tar tells it to read the tar file from stdin. Unpacking the distribution this way leaves the distribution in compressed form so it takes up less space.

You may see messages from tar about not being able to change the modification time on directories, and from gunzip complaining about a broken pipe. These messages are harmless and you can ignore them.

If for some reason you also want to have the tar file gunzipped, then invoke gunzip without the -c option:

If you have the zip version, use unzip with the "-x" flag on all of the .zip files (note that you cannot use pkunzip on these files, as pkunzip will not preserve the long filenames):

You can find precompiled versions of all of the compression and archive utilities in ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/utilities(ftp mirrors).

WARNING: Some utilities that handle tar files can incorrectly untar the distributions when using the default settings. If you encounter problems with Emacs, see the section below on troubleshooting these problems.

Now what?

Once you have unpacked a precompiled version of Emacs, it should have the subdirectories:

bin
etc
info
lisp
lock
site-lisp

If your utility failed to create the lock directory, then you can simply create it by hand (it is initially empty).

See below for information on where to place the .emacs startup file.

You should also find a file named README as a part of the distribution. Be sure to read this file for information on installing Emacs, as well as reading the section below on installing Emacs.

What do I do if Emacs does not work?

See the section below on troubleshooting Emacs if, after downloading a precompiled distribution and unpacking it according to the instructions above, you have trouble running Emacs.

I don't want the precompiled version. How do I compile Emacs myself?

To compile Emacs, you will need a Microsoft C compiler package. For NT, this can be any of the SDK compilers from NT 3.1 and up, Microsoft Visual C++ for NT (versions 1.0 and up), or Microsoft Visual C++ (versions 2.0 and up). For Windows 95, this can be Microsoft Visual C++ versions 2.0 and up.

Download and place the source distribution in a directory (say, c:\emacs). Unpack the distribution, and go to the nt subdirectory of the emacs directory that gets created in the unpacking process. Read the README and INSTALL files included with the distribution for the full details of this process.

How do I use a debugger on Emacs?

Emacs is just like any other Win32 application compiled and linked using MSVC, and it can be debugged using Win32 debuggers like DevStudio. By default, Emacs will compile with debugging options turned on. Once compiled, you should be able to load either temacs.exe, the undumped executable, or emacs.exe, the dumped executable, into the debugger (almost always you will want to debug emacs.exe).

Before you run it in the debugger, though, you will need to have the Emacs environment variables set in your shell so that the Emacs process uses the lisp and data files of the development tree instead of an installed version of Emacs. You can either set these variables by hand, or you can use the debug.bat batch file created in the nt subdirectory and installed in the bin directory. This batch file will set the appropriate environment variables and run msdev on the emacs.exe executable installed in the bin directory.

How do I install Emacs?

Below are two methods for installing Emacs. If the instructions below seem a bit confusing, Charles Curley <[email protected]> has also written a tutorial on installing Emacs that you might find useful.

How do I run Emacs?

You can run Emacs in a number of ways. If you installed Emacs using addpm, then you can run Emacs via the Start Menu using the "Programs->Gnu Emacs->Emacs" menu command. From the command line, you can use the program runemacs.exe.

If you didn't install Emacs using addpm, then you can run Emacs using the emacs.bat batch file in the Emacs bin directory. See the install section above for instructions on how to do this.

Note: Starting with version 19.34.6, Emacs is linked with setargv.obj. This gives Emacs DOS-style wildcard expansion of its command-line arguments, which should handle the common use of wildcards. To suppress expansion by setarg.obj, enclose the argument in double quotes. Embedded double-quotes will have to be escaped using a backslash.

How do I uninstall Emacs?

The only thing that Emacs changes in your system is the registry (if you used addpm to install it). Emacs does not, for example, install any files in your system directory. If you don't mind the registry settings remaining in the registry, then you don't need to do anything to uninstall Emacs.

If you want to remove the registry settings, then you can use the regedt32 program to remove the Emacs registry keys. Depending upon what kind of permissions you have, the registry entries could have been installed in either HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs.

When I run Emacs, nothing happens. What's the deal?

Emacs could have failed to run for a number of reasons. The most common symptom is that, when Emacs is started, the cursor changes for a second but nothing happens. If this happens to you, it is quite likely that the distribution was unpacked incorrectly. If you are using 19.31 on a machine that uses dialup networking, then it is also possible that Emacs is trying to resolve your machine's domain name as winsock.dll is being loaded.

See the next section for more info on working around this problem; check for the following to see if there was a problem during unpacking:

1. Be sure to disable the CR/LF translation or the executables will be unusable. Older versions of WinZipNT would enable this translation by default. If you are using WinZipNT, disable it.
2. Check that filenames were not truncated to 8.3. For example, in Emacs 19.34.6 there should be a file lisp\term\win32-win.el (it has been renamed to w32-win.el in Emacs 20); if this has been truncated to win32-wi.el, your distribution has been corrupted while unpacking and Emacs will not start.
3. I've been told that some utilities (WinZip again?) don't create the lock subdirectory. The lock subdirectory needs to be created.
4. I've also had reports that the gnu-win32 tar corrupts the executables. Use the version of tar on my ftp site instead.

If you are in doubt about whether the utilities you used unpacked the distribution incorrectly, use the gunzip, tar, and unzip executables provided in the utilities directory. These are the ones I use to create and test the distributions. My advice would be to use these utilities from the start.

If you feel certain that you have unpacked the distribution correctly, then you should check to make sure that the emacs_dir variable in the emacs.bat file is set correctly. If it is and you are still having trouble, make sure that it is an absolute path that includes the drive letter (or is in UNC format).

If Emacs produces an access violation when you run it, then it might be a problem with Emacs unsuccessfully interacting with other software such as HeapAgent and Starfish Internet Monitor. See the section below describing this problem and how to work around it.

If it is still not working, send me mail or send mail to the list.

Emacs used to work fine. But now it won't start, and I didn't change anything in Emacs.

The typical behavior people are encountering with this problem is that they invoke Emacs but either nothing happens or it produces an access violation, and yet they have changed nothing in their Emacs installation, and Emacs used to work fine before this point. Most likely, the problem is due to an interaction between Emacs and some new piece of software you have just installed (the most popular culprit seems to be HeapAgent). Due to the nature in which Emacs is designed and built, Emacs is fundamentally non-relocatable: it uses an initialized heap segment that needs to be mapped in at a particular virtual address at startup time before Emacs will work correctly. It appears that programs like HeapAgent install DLLs that intrude upon Emacs' virtual address space, preventing Emacs to load its initialized heap.

If you have HeapAgent, then you can work around the problem in three ways. You can download the source and recompile, as described below. Or, you can download a version that has already been precompiled to avoid conflicts with HeapAgent (compliments of Andrew Bishop <[email protected]>). Or, you can use editbin to change the base address at which the haloader.dll dll will be loaded (this is the dll that gets loaded into every application's address space on startup):

Otherwise, the only other workaround is to recompile Emacs on your machine so that Emacs creates and initializes its heap at a virtual address that does not conflict with software such as HeapAgent. To do this, you will need to download the source, #define the macro NTHEAP_PROBE_BASE inside the procedure src\ntheap.c:allocate_heap(), and rebuild.

2. Starfish Internet Monitor

Apparently, Starfish Internet Monitor interferes with Emacs' loading of the dumped heap in a manner similar to HeapAgent. See the discussion on HeapAgent above on how to work around this.

3. Aventail AutoSOCKS

Ditto with AutoSOCKS.

4. InstallShield

Starting around June, 1999, there have been reports that InstallShield occasionally hangs when Emacs is running. Currently, the cause is unknown, but Andrew is looking into it. If you have ideas, we would appreciate hearing them. [More Info]

I just upgraded the operating system, and Emacs no longer works.

I have received reports that, after upgrading the operating system (e.g., from NT 3.51 to NT 4.0), an installed Emacs will start but will not accept keyboard or mouse input. Apparantly, running addpm.exe as described in the installation section above fixes the problem.

I use anti-virus software. What problems can this cause?

Some anti-virus software seems to interact badly with Emacs.

Dr. Solomon's

A number of users have reported that Dr. Solomon's WinGuard prevent shell-related commands from working properly within Emacs. Turning off "Scan all files" makes it work, though.

McAfee

A similar report from Charles Curley <[email protected]>.

Why does Emacs seem to perform slowly under certain conditions?

In some situations, Emacs performance can degrade. The following sections discuss these situations, why they come about, and what you can do about them.

Menu bar updates

In 19.34 the menu bar is updated more often than it needs to be, and each update can be a time consuming process. If you are using a single frame, you will likely not notice this behavior; if you are using a number of frames, you might notice slow redisplay performance. Currently the only way of fixing this is to turn menu-bar-mode off (e.g., typing "M-x menu-bar-mode", or invoking (menu-bar-mode nil)).

For more background, see Andrew's messages on the topic.

Transient mark mode

The use of transient mark mode can trigger the slow menu bar update performance described above. When the mark is set in transient mark mode, the menu bar is updated after every keystroke and command. Again, turning off menu-bar-mode is the only way to prevent the slow performance without recompiling Emacs with patches.

Kim Storm <[email protected]> tracked down the bug in the core redisplay code that causes the performance problem with transient-mark-mode enabled. See the patches section below for his patch.

How does Emacs determine the name of my computer?

Emacs initializes the variable "system-name" with the name of your computer upon startup. However, Emacs uses two different methods for determining the computer name depending upon whether Winsock is loaded by default when Emacs starts up. If Winsock is automatically loaded, then Emacs uses gethostname, otherwise Emacs uses GetComputerName. Alternatively, you can override all of this by explicitly setting system-name in your startup file (also look at user-mail-address for composing mail messages).

By default, Emacs does not automatically load Winsock because doing so will cause Winsock to establish a connection to the network. If you are connected to a LAN, then nothing will happen, but if you dialup to an ISP then invoking Emacs (thereby loading Winsock) will prompt you to unexpectedly dialup to your ISP.

You can have Emacs automatically load Winsock by defining the environment variable PRELOAD_WINSOCK. You can set it to an arbitrary value; Emacs just checks to see if it is defined. Similarly, you can create a registry entry PRELOAD_WINSOCK with the other Emacs registry entries (in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs), which will do the same thing.

Why does Emacs ask me to connect to my dialup service when it starts up?

For some users, when Emacs starts up it pops up the dialog for connecting to their dialup service, or sometimes appears to hang for a few minutes and suddenly appear.

The reason for this is that Emacs now has networking support built in. When Emacs starts, the winsock DLL automatically gets loaded and tries to resolve the fully qualified domain name for your machine under the name "localhost". If the system doesn't have this name mapped, it will try to query a nameserver on the internet, which is typically some host within your ISP and subsequently prompts to connect to your dialup service so that it can ask a name server for the domain name of your machine. As you know, this is very unfortunate, and was not anticipated when the networking support was added.

This problem will be fixed when 19.32 comes out, but you can work around the problem by giving the dialup support another method for figuring out the domain name of your machine. To do this, you need to edit the hosts file for your system (located in %windir%\hosts on Win95 and %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on NT) so that localhost becomes an alias for your machine name. If your system doesn't have a hosts file yet, you can easily create one by copying the sample hosts file in the same directory, hosts.sam.

For example, if my machine were named banana-fish.cs.washington.edu, then I would edit the hosts file from:

to

The hostname should be the value of invoking (system-name) in the Emacs *scratch* buffer, i.e., the fully qualified domain name for your system. Note that you may also have to tell the system to look in the hosts file as well as using DNS.

When I run Emacs, a console window pops up. How do I make it go away?

This is annoying, I know, and you shouldn't have to be dealing with this. But please bear with me for now. If it isn't there already, prepend "start" to the last line of the .bat file (the line that invokes the emacs.exe executable). Then create a shortcut icon to the emacs.bat file, and edit the Properties of the shortcut (right click on the icon). On the Program tab, select Run: to be Minimized and make sure the Close on exit checkbox is checked. Double click on the icon, and Emacs should start up cleanly.

Reportedly, invoking emacs.exe with gnuclientw also prevents it from popping up its console window. gnuclientw is a part of the gnuserv package.

How do I cut & paste text with null characters?

Because of the way Emacs currently tries to share the clipboard with other Windows applications, you cannot cut and paste text with null characters embedded in it. David Biesack <[email protected]> describes a way to get around this, at least for cutting and pasting text just within Emacs.

How do I change the size, position, font, and color attributes of Emacs?

Emacs can run in two different interface modes: the Windows interface, which allows the flexible use and mixture of fonts and colors; and the console interface, which constrains Emacs to the limitations of console windows. The following two sections describe how to specify and change the size, position, font, and color attributes of Emacs in both interface modes.

Windows Interface

Why does Emacs overwrite the same file using different filenames?

Older versions of Windows 95 had a bug where different filenames with a particular structure would wind up with the same short filename, and hence the different filenames would point to the same file on disk. For example, "foo.mak" and "foo.mak~" will map to the same file. Early versions of Emacs suffered from this bug, but later versions (19.34.1 and above at least) work around it.

However, disabling the registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NameNumericTail in Windows 95/98 (by setting it to 0) will still cause these filename conflicts. According to Microsoft, this entry should never be set to 0 for Windows 95 and 98 (see MS KnowledgeBase articles Q148594 and Q179370), but if you must have it set to 0 then you should change how backup files are created. You can do this by setting the variable backup-by-copying to t in your startup file, or by redefining the function

Where do I put my .emacs (or _emacs) file?

Your startup file can be named either _emacs or .emacs, and should be placed in your "home" directory. If you have both files in your home directory, Emacs will load the .emacs file and ignore _emacs. Also, if you have a version of Emacs older than 19.31, Emacs will only recognize _emacs as the startup file.

Look carefully at what is printed and make sure the value is valid. For example, if the value has trailing whitespace, Emacs won't be able to find the directory. Also, be sure that the value isn't a relative drive letter (e.g., "d:" without a backslash); if it is, then HOME is going to be whatever the current directory on that drive is, which is likely not what you want to happen.

Samples

How can I modify Windows to be more like the X Windows System?

How do I swap CapsLock and Control?

CapsLock and Control cannot be swapped from within Emacs, and Windows does not have a convenient mechanism like xmodmap to change virtual key bindings. Instead, new keyboard layouts or device drivers can be installed, or the registry can be modified, to swap the two keys.

WARNING: If you use a new keyboard layout to switch CapsLock and Control, beware of the option to use hotkey sequences to switch keyboard layouts. This option is in Control Panel->Keyboard under the Language (Win95) or Input Locales (NT) tabs; the sequences themselves are "Left Alt+Control" and "Ctrl+Shift". If you enable one of these options, then you will likely at some point switch keyboard layouts while trying to use an Emacs key combination.

To get tab file completion in cmd.exe, use regedt32 to set the following registry entry to 0x9 (using the Edit->DWORD menu command):

It has been reported that this feature can randomly crash cmd.exe on occasion.

How can I have the focus follow the mouse?

Microsoft distributes a utility called Xmouse, part of a package of utilities called PowerToys, that lets you change the focus handling so that the focus follows the mouse. The PowerToys package can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/default.asp?CustArea=pers&Site=95&Product=Windows+95&Category=&x=15&y=10.

Note that not all of these utilities written on Windows 95 work on NT; reportedly, if you are on NT 4.0 you have to use the TweakUI utility to enable follow focus. Also, if you use TweakUI, reportedly it is best to set the popup delay to 0ms for focus follow to work well with Emacs.

For more info, you can flip through a collection of email messages discussing these utilities.

2) Registry

Steve Yegge <[email protected]> reports that there is an NT registry setting that enables mouse tracking (it's unknown whether this works on versions less than 4.0). Set the following key to 0x1:

Steve also says:

How can I have menus popup immediately?

You can use TweakUI, another utility from the PowerToys package, to change the delay that popup menus wait between the mouse click and actually popping up. Again, the PowerToys package can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/software/powertoy.htm.

Unix window managers and other tidbits

See http://floach.pimpin.net/

How can I modify Emacs to be more like a Windows app?

Keypad keys, highlighting selections, etc.

Some behaviors typically found in other Windows apps, such as deleting typed-over highlighted selections, are not configured by default in Emacs. You can, however, enable them by loading various packages. If you would like to highlight the region between the point and the mark, see the help text for transient-mark-mode; if you would like highlighted selections to be deleted when you type over them, see the help text for delete-selection-mode; if you would like to change the semantics of keypad keys such as "home" and "end", see the help text for pc-selection-mode.

Window operations (maximize, minimize, etc.)

If you are used to standard Windows application keybindings, such as C-c for copy, C-v for paste, and C-x for cut, or selecting text with <shift>-movement, then you probably want to use Kim Storm's <[email protected]> CUA-mode.el.

Open File dialog box

Binu Jose Philip <[email protected]> has written the dlgopen package to use the Windows Open File dialog box for opening files. Download dlgopen.zip, unpack, and read the top of the dlgopen.el file for directions on using the package.

Emacs multilingual font support

(Applies to version 20.4 and later)

Is it now possible to display correctly the sample of various scripts and languages accessible from the MULE menu?

If you have a Windows font for the script or language, then you should be able to display it using Emacs 20.4. Emacs 20.4 also supports the bdf fonts that were used with the older MULE for Windows version of Emacs and the more recent Meadow versions (as well as the X Windows versions of Emacs). For details on using the bdf fonts with Emacs, see below.

More about using Windows fonts:

There are a number of languages for which Windows fonts are not yet available, or are not in an appropriate format for Emacs to use, so you will not get every language to display. I also had some problem getting Japanese, Chinese, Cantonese and Korean to display all at once, but this was on Windows 95, and I suspect is a limitation of the OS, rather than a bug in Emacs, as those languages look fine when displayed one at a time (there is a note on the Microsoft language packs that only one may be installed at a time, which I suspect is because of this limitation).

Because some languages can only use proportional fonts, limited support has been added for proportional fonts as the non-ASCII font in fontsets. It should be general enough to work with any font, but it is not full proportional support, so the characters may not appear exactly as you expect. You may need to try several fonts to find one that appears reasonably correct if you wish to use Emacs with languages like Thai which use composition and hence use only proportional Windows fonts.

How do I get Emacs to display characters other than ISO-8859-1 (West European)?

If you are content with the size and style of font that Emacs uses at startup (Courier New 10), you could try using `fontset-standard', which will give you most languages that you have fonts for and Emacs supports. To use `fontset-standard' for all frames, place the following in your startup file:

or, to change for the current frame only:

To have more control over which fonts are used in a fontset, you need to specify the fontset manually.

If only one character set is needed, the easiest way to do this is to use `create-fontset-from-ascii-font' whereever you define a font.

If you require support for a number of languages, you should use `create-fontset-from-fontset-spec'. Note that installing more than one of the East Asian language packs is not supported by Microsoft, and does not work on Windows 95 at least. It is very difficult to get your system stable again after trying, so it is recommended that you only install the one that you will use the most, and use BDF fonts for the other languages:

If you leave character sets out of the fontset-spec above, a font will be chosen at random (not necessarily matching any of the other fonts in the fontset). The fontset name is used to generate the "default" font, which covers ASCII and iso8859-1.

To get a full list of character-sets use "M-x describe-fontset" to describe `fontset-standard'.

Where can I find fonts for other languages?

MS Windows fonts The Windows installation CDROM contains fonts for most European languages. If you did not install "Multilanguage Support" when you installed Windows, you can install it from the "Add Programs" Control Panel. East Asian Language (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) support for Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer can also be used by Emacs. These are available from http://www.microsoft.com/, or on the installation CDROMs. IE5 also has fonts for Thai, Vietnamese and other languages, although it is not known how well these work with Emacs. Fonts for many other languages are available on the WWW; a good starting point is http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides.html.

X Windows fonts There is a collection of international fonts for use with X Windows, and a set can be found at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/intlfonts. They are distributed in the bdf font file format, a format that can be handled by Emacs starting with version 20.3.5.1. For details on how to use these fonts with Emacs, see the section below on using bdf fonts with Emacs.

How do I use third party programs for displaying multibyte characters with Emacs?

Define a fontset (see above) listing any font of an appropriate size which works with the third party program for the appropriate character set(s). Change the character set to the character set you want displayed so Emacs knows how to display it. For example:

If this doesn't work, you may need to set `w32-enable-unicode-output' to nil.

How do I use a font with a name in my language?

This is most applicable to East Asian users. Others can probably get their fonts working (with a strange looking name), but it is nice to have the names of fonts displayed correctly.

You need to use the function `set-w32-system-coding-system' before the font is specified. If you are setting the font from your .emacs, you will need to make sure the coding-system of your .emacs supports the character set for the font name. An example (for Traditional Chinese) follows:

For Japanese, you would use japanese-shift-jis; for Simplified Chinese, chinese-iso-8bit; for Korean, korean-iso-8bit.

When I yank previously copied or killed text into a buffer, it appears garbled. How can I fix this?

`selection-coding-system' is most likely still at it's default of `iso-latin-1-dos'. You can change this to a more appropriate coding system using `set-selection-coding-system' (C-x RET x), or temporarily with `set-next-selection-coding-system' (C-x RET X). If you NEVER cut and paste between Emacs and other programs, you can make Emacs behave for all languages with:

To copy between Emacs and other apps, you may need to use the appropriate Windows codepage as your coding system. To do this, you need to set up the codepage first:

How do I get Emacs to display Smartquotes, the Euro symbol and other Microsoft additions to the ISO-8859 character sets?

There are two ways to do this: The "correct" way, using Emacs's built-in multilingual support, and the "easy" way, bypassing the multilingual support.

The correct way requires an additional elisp package ms-latn-ex.el, which defines a new character-set called `latin-extra'. After loading ms-latn-ex, you need to explicitly tell Emacs to use `latin-extra' via the set-buffer-file-coding-system, or set-default-coding-systems functions.

The easy way may cause problems with the display of some languages, so you can use the following in your .emacs at your own risk:

How do I print all these languages that Emacs is now displaying?

Emacs 20.4 has the ability to print non Western languages in two ways. Both use the "Postscript Print" functions, so if you do not have a Postscript printer, you will need to configure Emacs to print through Ghostscript.

1. Using built-in support in the printer (or in Ghostscript).
2. Using BDF fonts.

The variable `ps-multibyte-buffer' controls how non-latin characters are printed. If you are using built in support in the printer or Ghostscript, then setting this variable appropriately is all that needs to be done. To use BDF fonts, you will need to tell ps-print where to find them. This is done by setting `bdf-directory-list'. For example:

By default, Emacs uses 24 dot BDF fonts for normal text, 16 dot for bold and italic and 40 dot for some (uncommon) Chinese and Japanese character sets.

How can I use bdf fonts with Emacs?

To use bdf fonts with Emacs, you need to tell Emacs where the fonts are located, create fontsets for them, and then use them. We'll use the 16 dot international fonts from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/intlfonts as an example put together by Jason Rumney.

Download the 16dots.tar.gz file and unpack it; I'll assume that they are in "c:\intlfonts". Then set w32-bdf-filename-alist to the list of fonts returned by using w32-find-bdf-fonts to enumerate all of the font files. It is a good idea to set the variable bdf-directory-list at the same time so ps-print knows where to find the fonts:

Then create fontsets for the BDF fonts:

Many of the international bdf fonts from gnu.org are type 0, and therefore need to be added to font-encoding-alist:

You can now use the Emacs font menu (not the popup dialog; see below) to select the "bdf: 16-dot medium" fontset, or you can select it by setting the default font:

Try loading the file etc/HELLO, and you should be able to see the various international fonts displayed (except for Hindi, which is not included in the 16-dot font distribution).

How can I have Emacs use a font menu similar to the one it uses on Unix (with fonts and fontsets listed)?

Place the following in your startup file:

The font I want to use is not in the font menu, how can I put it there?

If you have set w32-use-w32-font-dialog to nil, you can add fonts to the font menu by changing `w32-fixed-font-alist'. For example:

How do I use leim with Emacs?

First you will need to download the leim package from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/. Then follow these instructions by Jason Rumney <[email protected]>.

How do I display different character sets with Emacs?

You can change standard-display-table to have extended characters displayed as themselves in Emacs. Emacs has a function standard-display-european that changes standard-display-table approprialely for displaying Latin-1 (ISO 8859) characters. To use it, invoke the function with a positive argument:

Andrew Innes <[email protected]> also has suggestions for displaying characters sets other than Latin-1.

If you would like to display particular characters that show up in Emacs in octal form, see another suggestion by Andrew.

ISO 8859/1 (Latin 1) using an OEM (MSDOS) font

Anders Lindgren <[email protected]> has written a package that will display a buffer written using a ISO 8859/1 character set using an OEM (ms-dos) font. See http://www.csd.uu.se/~andersl/emacs.shtml to get the package.

Displaying multibyte character sets

Emacs 20.3 does not display multibyte character sets correctly, although the situation should be better for 20.4. If you are using a package that enables multibyte, you will want to turn it off (likely in the package hook):

[More Info]

Subprocesses under Emacs

Emacs on NT and Win95 can utilize subprocesses just like Unix Emacs. However, the behavior of subprocesses with Emacs may be unintuitive in some situations. This section discusses these situations, and how you might work around them.

Quoting issues

The quoting rules for Windows shells and Cygnus shells have some subtle differences. When Emacs spawns subprocesses, it tries to determine whether the process is a Cygnus program and changes its quoting mechanism appropriately. [Discussion]

Programs reading input hang

Programs that explicitly use a handle to the console ("CON" or "CON:") instead of stdin and stdout cannot be used as subprocesses to Emacs, and they will also not work in shell-mode (the default ftp clients on Win95 and NT are examples of such programs). There is no convenient way for either Emacs or any shell used in shell-mode to redirect the input and output of such processes from the console to input and output pipes. The only workaround is to use a different implementation of the program that does not use the console directly (see the discussion on ange-ftp for a replacement for the default ftp clients).

Buffering in shells

You may notice that some programs, when run in a shell in shell-mode, have their output buffered (e.g., people have found this happening to them with sql-mode). When the program has a lot of output, it overflows the buffering and gets printed to the shell buffer; however, if the program only outputs a small amount of text, it will remain buffered and won't appear in the shell buffer.

Although it may at first seem like the shell is buffering the output from the program, it is actually the program that is buffering output. The C runtime typically decides how to buffer output based upon whether stdout is bound to a handle to a console window or not. If bound to a console window, output is buffered line by line; if bound to a block device, such as a file, output is buffered block by block.

In a shell buffer, stdout is a pipe handle and so is buffered in blocks. If you would like the buffering behavior of your program to behave differently, the program itself is going to have to be changed; you can use setbuf and setvbuf to manipulate the buffering semantics.

DOS subprocesses

You can run DOS subprocesses under Emacs, but with the limitation that you run only one at a time. The implication of this is that, if you use command.com under Win95 as your shell, then you can only run one shell process at a time (command.com is still a DOS process even under Win95). You can use other shells, such as bash, tcsh, or 4NT, instead of command.com; see the section below on other tools for pointers to other sites.

Andrew Innes is working on removing this limitation. If all goes well, it should be available in 19.35.

16-bit subprocesses accessing the A: drive

If you are finding that running 16-bit programs as subprocesses cause your A: drive to be accessed (hanging Emacs until a timeout occurs if no floppy is in the drive), check to see if you have McAfee Virus Shield installed. Users have found that disabling Virus Shield causes the problem to go away. Also, if you have a better fix for this problem, let me know or send mail to the list.

A followup from Bill Carpenter <[email protected]>.

Killing subprocesses on Win95/98

Emacs cannot guarantee that a subprocess gets killed on Win95/98, and is a difficult limitation to work around. For the forseeable future, you should always let subprocesses run to completion, including explicitly exiting interactive shells.

If you find that shutting down Win95/98 complains that there is a running cmdproxy even though you've exited all programs and it doesn't show up in the Task Manager until you shutdown, this could be a bad interaction with Norton VirusChecker.

Interrupting subprocesses in Emacs (e.g., C-c C-c in shell buffers)

19.34.4 Previously, Ctrl-C would generate a CTRL_BREAK_EVENT (SIGQUIT) in subprocesses. Now Ctrl-C generates a CTRL_C_EVENT (SIGINT). This behavior is more accurate, but may still causes problems; see Andrew's note.

19.34.1 For applications that handle Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Break events, you might notice that typing Ctrl-C in Emacs when those applications are run as subprocesses does not trigger their Ctrl-C handlers but instead triggers the Ctrl-Break handlers. Here is what is going on. Emacs in general tries to interrupt subprocesses using Unix-style kill and SIGINT. Ideally, on Win32 the kill emulation code can translate the SIGINT into a GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent with a CTRL_C_EVENT. However, doing so does not seem to propagate the CTRL_C_EVENT to the subprocess; as far as I can tell, nothing happens. So, instead of using a CTRL_C_EVENT for SIGINT, the emulation code uses a CTRL_BREAK_EVENT, which is propagated correctly to subprocesses.

If you need to handle Ctrl-C events propagated from Emacs, you'll need to use a Ctrl-Break handler for now. Andrew describes how all of this going to be handled in the future.

Sending eof to subprocesses in Emacs (e.g., C-c C-d in shell buffers)

When an eof is sent to a subprocess running in an interactive shell via process-send-eof, the shell terminates unexpectedly as if its input were closed. See this description for more info and an example.

How do I use a shell in Emacs?

You can use an interactive subshell in Emacs by typing "M-x shell". Emacs uses the SHELL configuration variable to determine which program to use as the shell. If you installed Emacs using the addpm.exe program, then addpm.exe will associate the value %COMSPEC% with SHELL in the registry. Emacs will then use the value of the COMSPEC environment variable when it starts up, unless the SHELL environment variable is explicitly defined (as when using the emacs.bat batch file).

If you would like to specify a different shell for Emacs to use, then you should do one of two things. You should either explicitly set the environment variable SHELL to be the shell you want to use, or, if you want to have the COMSPEC environment variable determine the shell, then you need to install Emacs using the addpm.exe program and ensure that the SHELL environment variable is not defined when you start up Emacs.

Note that sh-script.el does not recognize shell names when they have the '.exe' extension on them. If you use sh-script, you should omit the '.exe' extension when specifying the SHELL variable.

Alternatively, if you do not want to mess with the SHELL or COMSPEC variables, you can explicitly place the following in your startup file:

bash

You can get a version of bash with the Cygnus tools at http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-win32. To use bash with Emacs, place the following in your startup file:

Emacs 19.34

Emacs 20

Richard M. Heiberger's <[email protected]> setup for Cygnus B19.

For more configuration information with bash, take a look at Jonathan Payne's <[email protected]> setup.

If you find that you are having trouble with Emacs tracking drive changes with bash, see Mike Fabian's note <[email protected]>

WARNING:The latest version of bash sets and uses the environment variable PID. For some as yet unknown reason, if PID is set and Emacs passes it on to bash subshells, bash croaks (Emacs can inherit the PID variable if it's started from a bash shell). If you clear the PID variable in your startup file, you should be able to continue to use bash as your subshell: (12/18/97)

ksh

For a version of ksh by David Korn, take a look at http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin. I haven't tried this shell with Emacs, but I'm guessing that it works under Emacs and that you need the following for it to work properly:

If you find out otherwise, let me know and I'll update this section.

WARNING: People have reported that UWIN 1.5 ksh doesn't work with Emacs. I do not know why yet. If you figure out why, please send mail to the list.

MKS ksh

To use MKS ksh, place the following in your startup file:

tcsh

You can find tcsh at ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/tcsh. To use tcsh, place the following in your startup file:

For more configuration information with tcsh, take a look at Chris McMahan's <[email protected]> setup.

zsh

You can find zsh at ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh/

What do I do about the "No match 2 in highlight..." error I get from sh-script.el?

How do I prevent ctrl-m's from being printed in the shell?

If you are getting ctrl-m's printed in the shell buffer, try adding the following to your startup file:

How do I prevent shell commands from being echoed?

Some shells echo the commands that you send to them, and the echoed commands appear in the output buffer. In particular, the default shells, command.com on Win95 and cmd.exe on NT, have this behavior.

To prevent echoed commands from being printed, you can place the following in your startup file:

If shell-mode still is not stripping echoed commands, then you'll have to explicitly tell the shell to not echo commands. You can do this by setting the explicit-SHELL-args variable appropriately, where SHELL is the value of your shell environment variable (do a "M-: (getenv "SHELL")" to see what it is currently set to). Assuming that you are on NT and that your SHELL environment variable is set to cmd.exe, then placing the following in your startup file will tell cmd.exe to not echo commands:

The comint package will use the value of this variable as an argument to cmd.exe every time it starts up a new shell (as in shell-mode); the /q is the argument to cmd.exe that stops the echoing (in a shell, invoking "cmd /?" will show you all of the command line arguments to cmd.exe).

Note that this variable is case sensitive; if the value of your SHELL environment variable is CMD.EXE instead, then this variable needs to be named explicit-CMD.EXE-args instead.

How do I have Emacs complete directories with "/" instead of "\"?

The character appended to directory names when completing in shell-mode is determined by the value of the variable comint-completion-addsuffix. If the value of this variable it t, then a '/' is appended to directory names. If the value of this variable is a cons pair, then the first value of the pair is appended.

In 19.34, lisp\winnt.el initializes comint-completion-addsuffix to the cons pair '("\\" . " ") using shell-mode-hook. This means that, by default, a "\" is appended to directory names during completion in shell mode. To override this behavior, you need to change the value of comint-completion-addsuffix. You can do this by resetting it in your startup file to t or by explicitly setting it to a cons pair with "/" in it:

or

In 19.35, the default will be to append "/". If Emacs detects that you are using command.com or cmd.exe, then it will it use "\" instead.

Why is a "Specified COMMAND search directory bad" message printed?

The function shell in shell.el automatically invokes the shell program with the argument "-i", and parses this as the directory in which the shell program resides (which, of course, is invalid). To prevent this message from being printed, you can create a variable named according to the form specified in the help message of shell (to look at the help message, type "C-h f shell"). For the default shells, then, you could place the following in your startup file to prevent this message (these will eventually get into winnt.el so you don't have to do this):

Multiple lines for each shell are given since variable names are case sensitive and shell names can be any case (so this only handles the most common situations). If you have an entirely different shell that also complains about being given the "-i" switch, you can initialize a similarly named variable to prevent the "-i" switch from being sent to the shell.

Note that, if you would like to always pass arguments to an interactive shell when it starts up, you would change the nil value in the appropriate assignment above to the list of arguments you would like to use with your shell. For example, if you would like to invoke command.com and tell it which directory its executable resides, you could place something like the following in your startup file:

When I run programs within a shell I get "Incorrect DOS version" messages. Why?

This might happen if, for example, you invoke nmake in a shell and it tries to create subshells. The problem is related to the one above where, again, when the shell is initially created, the first argument to the shell is not the directory in which the shell program resides. When this happens, command.com fabricates a value for its COMSPEC environment variable that is incorrect. Then, when other programs go to use COMSPEC to find the shell, they are given the wrong value.

The fix for this is to either prevent any arguments from being sent to the shell when it starts up (in which case command.com will use a default, and correct, value for COMSPEC), or to have the first argument be the directory in which the shell executable resides. Examples of how to do both of these are in shown in the previous subsection.

When a do any shell-related commands, nothing happens. What could be wrong?

Chris Boucher <[email protected]> reports that Dr. Solomon's WinGuard prevents any shell related commands from working. He found that turning off "Scan all files" makes it work, though.

How do I use mail with Emacs?

You do not need to do much to use mail with Emacs under Win32, but you do need to be able to communicate with local mail daemons and mail servers (they do most of the work) to both receive and send mail from your system. These daemons and servers are typically running on the machines in your local network that are already handling mail for you and/or other users on other systems.

I've only tested the outgoing and incoming RMAIL setups. If you find that the suggested code for any of the other incoming mail configurations is inaccurate, please let me know.

Outgoing

For outgoing mail, you need to use smtpmail.el, which enables Emacs to talk SMTP with mail daemons (smtpmail.el was originally written by Tomoji Kagatani <[email protected]> and is now included in the Emacs distribution). You also need to add the following to your startup file (be sure to customize for you and your system):

Note that if you want to change the name of the smtp server after you've loaded smtpmail.el, you'll want to change the variable smtpmail-smtp-server.

If you are using GNUS to send mail, then you will also need:

If you are experiencing problems with sending large messages, check the value of the variable smtpmail-debug-info. If it is non-nil, you should set it to nil:

Outgoing: Queued

If you would like to queue your outgoing mail so that you can then later send it all as a batch (e.g., when you are working disconnected on a laptop), you can use the feedmail package written by Bill Carpenter <[email protected]>.

Feedmail comes with Emacs 20. If you're using 19.34, download the package from Bill's site, byte-compile it, and place it in your load path. You'll then need to customize it in your startup file; see Bill's setup for one example.

Fabio Somenzi <[email protected]> also sent the following as an example:

Fabio also redefined the function make-auto-save-file-name to auto-save files in one local directory ($HOME/.save) and to strip out invalid characters in file names (this bug should be fixed in 19.35). Note that all files will auto-save to this directory; this allows Emacs to auto-save even when the folder files are on an inaccessible remote machine. Place the following definition of make-auto-save-file-name in your startup file to override the definition in winnt.el.

Lastly, if you would like to protect the primary folder from crashes while it is being written back to disk, then also place the following in your startup file (assuming you use VM):

Incoming: RMAIL and POP3

For incoming mail using the RMAIL package and a POP3 mail server, you need only place the following in your startup file (again, be sure to customize):

Note that you will need to customize the Domain name of machine with POP3 server and Your login fields to be the name of your POP server and your login name.

Incoming: VM and POP3

For incoming mail using the VM package and a POP3 mail server, you first need the vm package (check any elisp archive) and then you need to place the following in your .vm configuration file:

Note that you will need to customize the POP3 server and POP user name fields to be your login name and the name of your POP server. You will also probably want to customize the name of your inbox and crash files (~/INBOX and ~/INBOX.CRASH in the example above.)

Incoming: GNUS

You should be able to use Gnus 5.2 and above as a mail reader. The following was sent as an example by Marc Fleischeuers <[email protected]>:

Be sure to customize the POP user name field appropriately.

Sharing with Unix: RMAIL

If you want to share your rmail folders between Unix and NT/95, you'll want to handle all your mail in binary format. This includes mail stored in folders as well as incoming mail. For mail stored in folders, you'll want to treat the directory in which you store your mail as an untranslated file system; see the section on translation below on how to do this.

For incoming mail using RMAIL, you'll need to make a small patch to rmail.el. See Don Erway's <[email protected]> message describing the patch and what else he did to setup sharing between Unix and NT/95.

Mail notification

Handling attachments: MIME with tm

I don't know of any complete ports of tm to the Win32 environment, but Fabrice Popineau <[email protected]> has made some modifications to the OS2 version of tm. See his description of what he has done for more info. The support programs mentioned can be found in mm.zip (note that they have only been tested on NT 4.0, though).

Biff tools: POP

Bill Carpenter <[email protected]> has encountered some problems with the use of vm-pop and smtpmail on Win95. Occasionally, Win95 would crash due, apparently, to a large number of TCP connections waiting to timeout due to a race condition in connection shutdown. In addition, he found that using vm-pop to download a large message (~1.5 MB) crashed Emacs because "process space was exhausted." If you think you are suffering from similar problems, you might want to read his descriptions and thoughts on the problems.

The latest version of VM works around the problems in vm-pop, but smtpmail requires a small patch. If you are encountering similar problems, then you should modify the end of smtpmail-via-smtp in smtpmail.el as follows:

How do I read news with Emacs using Gnus?

If you need to connect and post to an authenticated news server, you'll need to give Gnus a password to send along to the server. To have Gnus prompt for a password, add the following to your startup file:

For more discussion and other methods of giving Gnus a password, see a discussion on the topic.

How do I use mime with Gnus?

See the "Does Gnus have MIME support?" question from the Gnus FAQ.

How do I save messages in untranslated format?

To save messages untranslated (no carriage returns), you must set the default-buffer-file-type to binary:

How do I read online newspapers with Emacs?

How do I use TeX with Emacs?

(Note: If you use anti-virus software, see the warnings above.)

MiKTeX

MiKTeX is a native Win32 implementation of the TeX document processing system. The MiKTeX project page is at http://www.snafu.de/~cschenk/miktex. The project page has instructions on where to download the distribution and how to install it.

AUCTeX

AUCTeX is a package for writing LaTeX files in Emacs. The AUCTeX project page is at http://sunsite.auc.dk/auctex, and has links for downloading the distribution and reading the manual. Lars Schmidt-Thieme <[email protected]> has written instructions on how to use AucTex with MikTex and Emacs.

Putting it all together

Emacs for SGML editing and publishing on Windows

How do I use Emacs to translate text among languages?

Emacs and PGP

How Do I Use Emacs with Microsoft Visual C++

VisEmacs

For a close coupling of Emacs and MSVC, Christopher Payne <[email protected]> wrote a Visual Studio add-in that makes Emacs the default text editor. See http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~payneca/emacs/VisEmacs.html for more info on what it can do and how it works. For information on how to customize your general development environment to use Emacs with MSVC, read Charles Curley's text below. For VisEmacs alpha executables, download this VisEmacs.zip distribution.

VC5/VC6 issues.

Emacs and MSVC

Written by Charles Curley with a lot of help from: David Biesack, Caleb T. Deupree, John Huxoll Gardner, Anders Lindgren, and John Yates.

This is an app note on how to use Microsoft Visual C++ with Emacs. The experiments done below were done with Emacs 19.34.1 on Windows 95, using Visual C++ 4.0 Standard Edition. Your mileage may vary.

This writeup assumes minimal knowledge of Emacs hacking on the part of the reader.

VC++ Environmental Variables

Under NT, you can set the HOME and other environment variables in the System applet of the Control Panel.

By the way, you can scroll in the M-X command buffer with up and down arrows. You can also scroll in the compile command buffer with the up and down arrows. Both seem to be fully editable as well.

Setting the Default Command Line

If you work on the same project extensively, toss that in to the default string. You can always override it when you work on another project.

By the way, many if not all Microsoft command line programs now accept a dash (-) as a switch specifier as well as a slash (/). This was true as long ago as Mess-DOS 6.0, I believe. I use it because that eliminates one area where I have to remember which OS I am using. :-)

and then you can simply change compile-command to "nmake".

Caleb T. Deupree reports that on VC++ 5.0 and up, "You can also set an option on Options/Build to export a makefile every time the project is saved, which you can then use to compile with 'nmake -f project.mak'." VC++ 4.0 builds the make file every time, and there is no option.

Handling Compile Time Errors

Those of you who never get compile time errors can skip this section.

One of the things that compile.el provides is the ability to scan the output from a compile session, and move from error message to error message. This facility depends on a series of regular expressions ("regexes") which are applied to search the compiler output. Normally, you shouldn't have to do anything. However, if you have problems with this facility, you can comment out the regexes you don't need and recompile. Search the file for "compilation-error-regexp-alist" and comment out as needed.

To recompile, make the file the active buffer. Emacs will recognize it as an elisp file, and add a pull-down menu for elisp functions. One is for compiling, the other will compile and then load.

By the way, the best (and so far, only :-) book I've seen on regular expressions is Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, *Mastering Regular Expressions*, O'Reilly & Assoc, Inc, 1997. It covers regex syntax and usage for Emacs, perl and other tools that regexes.

Reverting Buffers

Then there is the problem that sometimes you modify the source from Microsoft's IDE. Here's some help for that.

Occasionally, you need to add a new function or variable from the Visual C++ IDE. This means that the copy of the file in your Emacs buffer is now obsolete. The simplest thing to is a two part manual effort. First, before you leave Emacs for VC++, make sure you save all your buffers (C-X S). When you return, you can revert buffers you know have been changed with M-X revert-buffer. If you try to modify a file that has been changed from outside Emacs (say, by VC++), Emacs will warn you and offer you the chance to revert the buffer, so you can safely try modifying files after making a change from VC++.

(Now, *that* is an elisp hacker's sig line! :-)

The next version of Emacs to which Anders refers is, I believe, 20. I don't know when it will be released.

If you can't wait, you can scarf the source for autorevert.el in from Anders' web page. However, it is dependent on another Emacs package, Custom, which is not in the version of Emacs I have (19.34.1). Custom is available at http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/custom/. Installing the Custom package is beyond my meager elisp hacking skills, so you are on your own there. The next release will also include Custom.

Caleb T. Deupree also writes, "You might also mention a package mode-compile.el, which is a wrapper around compile mode and is available from the Emacs lisp archive or from http://www.cenatls.cena.dgac.fr/~boubaker/Emacs/index.html. It detects makefiles in directories and parses them for valid targets, performing many of the same tasks which you do in your hooks."

Exporting a File to Emacs

You can also set up VC++ to import a file into Emacs for you, all ready for editing. You will need the Gnuclient package, which is used to associate file extensions with Emacs. In VC++, go to the Tools pulldown menu, and click on Customize.... In the Tools tab, click on Add. Use Browse to locate your gnuclientw.exe file, and select it. For arguments, use +$(CurLine) "$(FilePath)" and for the directory use the $(WkspDir) (the quotes around FilePath handle paths with spaces in them). Set the Menu Text to say "Em&acs". The "+$(CurLine)" will set point in Emacs to the same line as the cursor position in VC++. The ampersand in the word "Em&acs" allows you to select emacs from the keyboard. (E is already used for the OLE control test container.) [Image of Customize dialog]

You should now be able to go to any source file in your project. Then, use the pull-down menu Tools->Emacs. The active file in your VC++ ide should now be front and center in Emacs, all ready to edit as you wish. If you use keystrokes to work the menus, try <alt>T A to move the file into Emacs. Binding this tool to a keystroke will be left as an exercise for the student.

If you have the option of saving files before running tools, make sure this option is set. (I don't see it on VC++ 4.0.)

Emacs and Borland C++ Builder

Jonathan Arnold's <[email protected]> EmacsEdit "expert" for interfacing C++ Builder and Emacs.

How do I use an Intellimouse with Emacs?

The Emacs 20.3 pretests and above support the Intellimouse on both NT and Win9X. Emacs 19.34.6 supports it on NT, but not on Win95.

Clicking the mouse wheel is interpreted as a mouse-2 event, which is normally bound to mouse-yank-at-click (i.e., paste). Since it is easy to accidentally click the mouse wheel, you might find that you inadvertantly paste text as you scroll the wheel. To prevent this from happening, you can disable the mouse-2 binding in your startup file:

Walt Buehring <[email protected]> has extended the implementations of mouse-wheel-scroll-line and mouse-wheel-scroll-screen. To use, download and place in your startup or site-init files.

For more details on interpreting mouse-wheel events in elisp, see Michael Duggan's <[email protected]> description of the implementation.

Interactions with FlyWheel

Apparently, FlyWheel and Emacs Intellimouse support don't work together. You can selectively disable FlyWheel for Emacs using a registry entry; see the FlyWheel README for how to disable it for a specific application.

Why does Emacs ignore my mouse wheel?

How do I use perl-mode with Emacs?

A perl-mode comes with the Emacs distribution, and will be used when you load and edit Perl files.

Users have also recommended an alternate mode named cperl-mode. You can get this from ftp://ftp.math.ohio-state.edu/pub/users/ilya/perl/.

How do I use the perl debugger with Emacs?

From Jay Rogers <[email protected]>:

Doug Campbell <[email protected]> also has some suggestions for improving the interaction of perldb and Emacs.

How do I use hexl-mode with Emacs?

On NT, you should be able to use hexl-mode as you would on Unix (e.g., M-x hexl-mode and you're off to the races). On Windows 95, however, you won't be able to use hexl-mode if you use command.com as your shell because it doesn't accept input from stdin. Instead, you will have to use one of the non-system shells (see the section below on shells for more info on some shells you can use). You might also have to explicitly set hexlify-command and dehexlify-command; for more info from users who have gotten it to work on their system, take a look at these suggestions.

If you are having trouble with hexl-mode and bash, see Andrew's comments on the topic.

How do I use python-mode with Emacs?

The python-mode shipped with Python 1.5 requires a new custom.el before it can be used with Emacs 19.34. For more information, see the description of python-mode at http://www.python.org/emacs/python-mode/.

<a name="