Re: Full-screen editor in /bin
Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@mindspring.com> writes:
> I promise not to give a running commentary on my experience with emacs,
> but I just entered 'emacs' in a terminal (naively expecting it to open in
> my terminal, because I thought _xemacs_ was a whole different
> application)
It is. But they both have similar features these days... xemacs was
forked from Emacs before Emacs had X support.
> and it opened a window _taller_ than my 800x600 display. Not a good
> start!
Emacs does obey --geometry (or -g) options (ie, -g WIDTHxHEIGHT,
where width and height are in characters). You can also set it in
your .Xdefaults as
Emacs.geometry: WIDTHxHEIGHT
> Can I run it _in_ a terminal, the way I run nano?
Yes, emacs -q (or unset the DISPLAY variable).
> And it _still_ strikes me as unintuitive - I just want to _edit_ for
> gods' sake and it opens with all this information about buffers and
> stuff in _exactly_ the place where I expect to be entering my text.
That's supposed to be helpful, by the way. Hit C-h t for the
tutorial.
> you don't want to save, and for Lisp evaluation." Huh? This is
> _not_ intuitive.
Emacs does have menus. They should help.
> (And when I do what it tells me - C-x C-f - it leaves me in that
> buffer.)
It should move you to the bottom of the window (in the minibuffer)
where you can enter a filename (with tab completion).
> All I want to do is open a file or a blank page and enter text. emacs
> seems to resist my doing that.
Yes, it does. It wants you to start by opening a file (the file
doesn't have to exist, it can be new). Once you have opened a file,
anything you enter is autosaved so that even if Emacs or the machine
crashes, your text is safe. If you just start entering text in a
blank buffer, it can't do that.
--
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
You, sir, are truly the offspring of a crossbred penguin.
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