Emacs and ELSE

[Andrew McGregor]

--On Monday, January 06, 2003 02:13:32 +0100 Dialtone 
<"dialtone/#NOSPAM#\\"@aruba.it> wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Jan 2003 06:51:23 +1100, "Peter Milliken"
> <peterm at resmed.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Hope this helps and adds constructively to Andrew's explanation - good
>> luck :-)
>
> Well... so and so... when I open a .py file I get 2 new menus: Python
> and IM-Python. The last one only has 1 option which is *Rescan*.

Those are the standard python-mode menus.  If you load a file with some 
code in it, the IM-Python menu will have all the classes and methods in it, 
so you can jump straight to them.  *Rescan* is just there in case it gets 
out of sync, which can happen if you make lots of edits without saving.

> I cannot even get it to automatically highlight my .py file (I can
> highlight it only tickin "In this buffer" in "Options" menu...

Go to the bottom of that menu and select 'save options' :-)  You'll find 
that it automatically edits the tail end of your .emacs file.

Other things you may want from that menu:
Display->Paren Highlighting (try the modes till you find one you like)
Display->Line Numbers
Keyboard and Mouse->Delete key deletes selection (normally, you can't 
select something and overtype it or delete the whole thing, like most GUI 
editors.  This toggles that)

Oh, and the M-/ dabbrev expansion is on by default.

> I tried M-x else-mode but I get a [No match]
>
> I guess this is because I don't have a real home directory (like in
> linux) and because XEmacs win version doesn't use .emacs file as
> default, actually it doesn't even have a conf file (as I have seen)
> unless you rename sample.emacs into .emacs (but as you can imagine,
> that file is huge and doesn't really fit my preferences...

You know, you really don't need *anything* in .emacs bar the few lines for 
ELSE and whatever the options menu puts there.  XEmacs has evolved; my 
.emacs used to be 700 lines, but now I only make about 3 lines of manual 
changes.

> I managed to find a lot of help files for linux that talked about home
> directory and so on but nothing really useful for the windows version
> (which in fact is a bit different...)

By default, windows XEmacs thinks your home directory is C:\
I think there's an environment variable to change that.

> Have I been clear enough?
>
> Thx for your help... I really look forward using ELSE mode... as you
> saw it's one of the 2 reasons I tried emacs :)

Andrew