auto-fill-mode by default?
load-path?
switch?
#ifdef commands are handled by the compiler?
etags?
auto-save-mode?
ls from the Shell mode?
xterm window?
This is the GNU Emacs FAQ, last updated on 2 August 2009.
This FAQ is maintained as a part of GNU Emacs. If you find any errors, or have any suggestions, please use M-x report-emacs-bug to report them.
This is the version of the FAQ distributed with Emacs 23.1, and mainly describes that version. Although there is some information on older versions, details about very old releases (now only of historical interest) have been removed. If you are interested in this, consult either the version of the FAQ distributed with older versions of Emacs, or the history of this document in the Emacs source repository.
Since Emacs releases are very stable, we recommend always running the latest release.
This FAQ is not updated very frequently. When you have a question about Emacs, the Emacs manual is often the best starting point.
Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Copyright © 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000
Reuven M. Lerner
Copyright © 1992, 1993 Steven Byrnes
Copyright © 1990, 1991, 1992 Joseph Brian Wells
This list of frequently asked questions about GNU Emacs with answers (“FAQ”) may be translated into other languages, transformed into other formats (e.g. Texinfo, Info, WWW, WAIS), and updated with new information.The same conditions apply to any derivative of the FAQ as apply to the FAQ itself. Every copy of the FAQ must include this notice or an approved translation, information on who is currently maintaining the FAQ and how to contact them (including their e-mail address), and information on where the latest version of the FAQ is archived (including FTP information).
The FAQ may be copied and redistributed under these conditions, except that the FAQ may not be embedded in a larger literary work unless that work itself allows free copying and redistribution.
[This version has been heavily edited since it was included in the Emacs distribution.]
This chapter describes notation used in the GNU Emacs FAQ, as well as in the Emacs documentation. Consult this section if this is the first time you are reading the FAQ, or if you are confused by notation or terms used in the FAQ.
Key sequences longer than one key (and some single-key sequences) are written inside quotes or on lines by themselves, like this:
M-x frobnicate-while-foo RET
Any real spaces in such a key sequence should be ignored; only <SPC> really means press the space key.
The ASCII code sent by C-x (except for C-?) is the value that would be sent by pressing just <x> minus 96 (or 64 for upper-case <X>) and will be from 0 to 31. On Unix and GNU/Linux terminals, the ASCII code sent by M-x is the sum of 128 and the ASCII code that would be sent by pressing just <x>. Essentially, <Control> turns off bits 5 and 6 and <Meta> turns on bit 71.
C-? (aka <DEL>) is ASCII code 127. It is a misnomer to call C-? a “control” key, since 127 has both bits 5 and 6 turned ON. Also, on very few keyboards does C-? generate ASCII code 127.
see Keys, for more information. (See Emacs manual, for more information about Info.)
M-x command means type M-x, then type the name of the command, then type <RET>. (See Basic keys, if you're not sure what M-x and <RET> mean.)
M-x (by default) invokes the command
execute-extended-command. This command allows you to run any
Emacs command if you can remember the command's name. If you can't
remember the command's name, you can type <TAB> and <SPC> for
completion, <?> for a list of possibilities, and M-p and
M-n (or up-arrow and down-arrow) to see previous commands entered.
An Emacs command is an interactive Emacs function.
Your system administrator may have bound other key sequences to invoke
execute-extended-command. A function key labeled Do is a
good candidate for this, on keyboards that have such a key.
If you need to run non-interactive Emacs functions, see Evaluating Emacs Lisp code.
When we refer you to some topic in the Emacs manual, you can read this manual node inside Emacs (assuming nothing is broken) by typing C-h i m emacs <RET> m topic <RET>.
This invokes Info, the GNU hypertext documentation browser. If you don't already know how to use Info, type <?> from within Info.
If we refer to topic:subtopic, type C-h i m emacs <RET> m topic <RET> m subtopic <RET>.
If these commands don't work as expected, your system administrator may not have installed the Info files, or may have installed them improperly. In this case you should complain.
If you are reading this FAQ in Info, you can simply press <RET> on a reference to follow it.
See Getting a printed manual, if you would like a paper copy of the Emacs manual.
These are files that come with Emacs. The Emacs distribution is divided into subdirectories; e.g. etc, lisp, and src. Some of these (e.g. etc and lisp) are present both in an installed Emacs and in the sources, but some (e.g. src) are only found in the sources.
If you use Emacs, but don't know where it is kept on your system, start
Emacs, then type C-h v data-directory <RET>. The directory
name displayed by this will be the full pathname of the installed
etc directory. (This full path is recorded in the Emacs variable
data-directory, and C-h v displays the value and the
documentation of a variable.)
The location of your Info directory (i.e., where Info documentation
is stored) is kept in the variable Info-default-directory-list. Use
C-h v Info-default-directory-list <RET> to see the value of
this variable, which will be a list of directory names. The last
directory in that list is probably where most Info files are stored. By
default, Emacs Info documentation is placed in /usr/local/share/info.
For information on some of the files in the etc directory, see Informational files for Emacs.
Avoid confusing the FSF and the LPF. The LPF opposes look-and-feel copyrights and software patents. The FSF aims to make high quality free software available for everyone.
The word “free” in the title of the Free Software Foundation refers to “freedom,” not “zero cost.” Anyone can charge any price for GPL-covered software that they want to. However, in practice, the freedom enforced by the GPL leads to low prices, because you can always get the software for less money from someone else, since everyone has the right to resell or give away GPL-covered software.
This chapter contains general questions having to do with Emacs, the Free Software Foundation, and related organizations.
The LPF opposes the expanding danger of software patents and look-and-feel copyrights. More information on the LPF's views is available at the LPF home page.
The real legal meaning of the GNU General Public License (copyleft) will only be known if and when a judge rules on its validity and scope. There has never been a copyright infringement case involving the GPL to set any precedents. Although legal actions have been brought against companies for violating the terms of the GPL, so far all have been settled out of court (in favour of the plaintiffs). Please take any discussion regarding this issue to the newsgroup news:gnu.misc.discuss, which was created to hold the extensive flame wars on the subject.
RMS writes:
The legal meaning of the GNU copyleft is less important than the spirit, which is that Emacs is a free software project and that work pertaining to Emacs should also be free software. “Free” means that all users have the freedom to study, share, change and improve Emacs. To make sure everyone has this freedom, pass along source code when you distribute any version of Emacs or a related program, and give the recipients the same freedom that you enjoyed.
The file etc/MAILINGLISTS describes the purpose of each GNU mailing list (see Informational files for Emacs). For those lists which are gatewayed with newsgroups, it lists both the newsgroup name and the mailing list address. The Emacs mailing lists are also described at the Emacs Savannah page.
The newsgroup news:comp.emacs is for discussion of Emacs programs in general. The newsgroup news:gnu.emacs.help is specifically for GNU Emacs. It therefore makes no sense to cross-post to both groups, since only one can be appropriate to any question.
Messages advocating “non-free” software are considered unacceptable on
any of the gnu.* newsgroups except for news:gnu.misc.discuss,
which was created to hold the extensive flame-wars on the subject.
“Non-free” software includes any software for which the end user can't
freely modify the source code and exchange enhancements. Be careful to
remove the gnu.* groups from the ‘Newsgroups:’ line when
posting a followup that recommends such software.
news:gnu.emacs.bug is a place where bug reports appear, but avoid posting bug reports to this newsgroup directly (see Reporting bugs).
The FSF has maintained archives of all of the GNU mailing lists for many years, although there may be some unintentional gaps in coverage. The archive can be browsed over the web at the GNU mail archive. Raw files can be downloaded from ftp://lists.gnu.org/.
Web-based Usenet search services, such as
Google, also
archive the gnu.* groups.
You can also read the archives of the gnu.* groups and post new
messages at Gmane. Gmane is a service that
presents mailing lists as newsgroups (even those without a traditional
mail-to-news gateway).
The correct way to report Emacs bugs is to use the command M-x report-emacs-bug. It sets up a mail buffer with the essential information and the correct e-mail address, which is bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org for the released versions of Emacs. Anything sent to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org also appears in the newsgroup news:gnu.emacs.bug, but please use e-mail instead of news to submit the bug report. This ensures a reliable return address so you can be contacted for further details.
Be sure to read the “Bugs” section of the Emacs manual before reporting a bug! The manual describes in detail how to submit a useful bug report (see Reporting Bugs). (See Emacs manual, if you don't know how to read the manual.)
RMS says:
Sending bug reports to help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org (which has the effect of posting on news:gnu.emacs.help) is undesirable because it takes the time of an unnecessarily large group of people, most of whom are just users and have no idea how to fix these problem. bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org reaches a much smaller group of people who are more likely to know what to do and have expressed a wish to receive more messages about Emacs than the others.
RMS says it is sometimes fine to post to news:gnu.emacs.help:
If you have reported a bug and you don't hear about a possible fix,
then after a suitable delay (such as a week) it is okay to post on
gnu.emacs.help asking if anyone can help you.
If you are unsure whether you have found a bug, consider the following non-exhaustive list, courtesy of RMS:
If Emacs crashes, that is a bug. If Emacs gets compilation errors while building, that is a bug. If Emacs crashes while building, that is a bug. If Lisp code does not do what the documentation says it does, that is a bug.
If you are receiving a GNU mailing list named list, you should be able to unsubscribe from it by sending a request to the address list-request@gnu.org. Mailing lists mails normally contain information in either the message header (‘List-Unsubscribe:’) or as a footer that tells you how to unsubscribe.
For up-to-date information, see the FSF contact web-page.
For details on how to order items directly from the FSF, see the FSF on-line store.
This chapter tells you how to get help with Emacs.
Type C-h t to invoke the self-paced tutorial. Just typing C-h enters the help system. Starting with Emacs 22, the tutorial is available in many foreign languages such as French, German, Japanese, Russian, etc. Use M-x help-with-tutorial-spec-language <RET> to choose your language and start the tutorial.
Your system administrator may have changed C-h to act like <DEL> to deal with local keyboards. You can use M-x help-for-help instead to invoke help. To discover what key (if any) invokes help on your system, type M-x where-is <RET> help-for-help <RET>. This will print a comma-separated list of key sequences in the echo area. Ignore the last character in each key sequence listed. Each of the resulting key sequences (e.g. <F1> is common) invokes help.
Emacs help works best if it is invoked by a single key whose value
should be stored in the variable help-char.
There are several methods for finding out how to do things in Emacs.
Info-goto-emacs-command-node) prompts
for the name of a command, and then attempts to find the section in the
Emacs manual where that command is described.
You can order a printed copy of the Emacs manual from the FSF. For details see the FSF on-line store.
The full Texinfo source for the manual also comes in the doc/emacs directory of the Emacs distribution, if you're daring enough to try to print out this several-hundred-page manual yourself (see Printing a Texinfo file).
If you absolutely have to print your own copy, and you don't have TeX, you can get a PostScript or PDF (or HTML) version from
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/
See Learning how to do something, for how to view the manual from Emacs.
Within Emacs, you can type C-h f to get the documentation for a function, C-h v for a variable.
For more information, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual is available in Info format (see Emacs Lisp).
You can also order a hardcopy of the manual from the FSF, for details see the FSF on-line store. (This manual is not always in print.)
An HTML version of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual is available at
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp-manual/elisp.html
Emacs releases come with pre-built Info files, and the normal install process places them in the correct location. This is true for most applications that provide Info files. The following section is only relevant if you want to install extra Info files by hand.
First, you must turn the Texinfo source files into Info files. You may do this using the stand-alone makeinfo program, available as part of the Texinfo package at
http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/
For information about the Texinfo format, read the Texinfo manual which comes with the Texinfo package. This manual also comes installed in Info format, so you can read it from Emacs; type C-h i m texinfo <RET>.
Alternatively, you could use the Emacs command M-x texinfo-format-buffer, after visiting the Texinfo source file of the manual you want to convert.
Neither texinfo-format-buffer nor makeinfo installs the
resulting Info files in Emacs's Info tree. To install Info files,
perform these steps:
install-info command, which is part of the Texinfo
distribution, to update the main Info directory menu, like this:
install-info --info-dir=dir-path dir-path/file
where dir-path is the full path to the directory where you copied the produced Info file(s), and file is the name of the Info file you produced and want to install.
If you don't have the install-info command installed, you can
edit the file info/dir in the installed Emacs distribution, and
add a line for the top level node in the Info package that you are
installing. Follow the examples already in this file. The format is:
* Topic: (relative-pathname). Short description of topic.
If you want to install Info files and you don't have the necessary privileges, you have several options:
info command and specify
the name of the Info file in the minibuffer. This goes to the node
named ‘Top’ in that file. For example, to view a Info file named
info-file in your home directory, you can type this:
C-u C-h i ~/info-file <RET>
Alternatively, you can feed a file name to the Info-goto-node
command (invoked by pressing <g> in Info mode) by typing the name
of the file in parentheses, like this:
C-h i g (~/info-file) <RET>
Info-default-directory-list. For example, to use a private Info
directory which is a subdirectory of your home directory named Info,
you could put this in your .emacs file:
(add-to-list 'Info-default-directory-list "~/Info")
You will need a top-level Info file named dir in this directory
which has everything the system dir file has in it, except it
should list only entries for Info files in that directory. You might
not need it if (fortuitously) all files in this directory were
referenced by other dir files. The node lists from all
dir files in Info-default-directory-list are merged by the
Info system.
You can't get nicely printed output from Info files; you must still have the original Texinfo source file for the manual you want to print.
Assuming you have TeX installed on your system, follow these steps:
\input texinfo
You may need to change ‘texinfo’ to the full pathname of the texinfo.tex file, which comes with Emacs as doc/misc/texinfo.tex (or copy or link it into the current directory).
Alternatively, ‘texi2pdf’ produces PDF files.
dvips program to print the DVI file on that
printer.
To get more general instructions, retrieve the latest Texinfo package (see Installing Texinfo documentation).
Yes. Here are some alternative programs:
info, a stand-alone version of the Info program, comes as part of
the Texinfo package. See Installing Texinfo documentation, for
details.
This isn't a frequently asked question, but it should be! A variety of informational files about Emacs and relevant aspects of the GNU project are available for you to read.
The following files (and others) are available in the etc directory of the Emacs distribution (see File-name conventions, if you're not sure where that is). Many of these files are available via the Emacs ‘Help’ menu, or by typing C-h ? (M-x help-for-help).
More GNU information, including back issues of the GNU's Bulletin, are at
http://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bulletins.html and
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/gnu.html
See Installing Emacs, for some basic installation hints, and see Problems building Emacs, if you have problems with the installation.
The GNU Service directory lists companies and individuals willing to sell you help in installing or using Emacs and other GNU software.
The Emacs FAQ is distributed with Emacs in Info format. You can read it by selecting the ‘Emacs FAQ’ option from the ‘Help’ menu of the Emacs menu bar at the top of any Emacs frame, or by typing C-h C-f (M-x view-emacs-FAQ). The very latest version is available in the Emacs development repository (see Latest version of Emacs).
This chapter gives you basic information about Emacs, including the status of its latest version.
Emacs originally was an acronym for Editor MACroS. RMS says he “picked the name Emacs because <E> was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at the time.” The first Emacs was a set of macros written in 1976 at MIT by RMS for the editor TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, originally Tape Editor and COrrector) under ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System) on a PDP-10. RMS had already extended TECO with a “real-time” full-screen mode with reprogrammable keys. Emacs was started by Guy Steele as a project to unify the many divergent TECO command sets and key bindings at MIT, and completed by RMS.
Many people have said that TECO code looks a lot like line noise; you can read more at news:alt.lang.teco. Someone has written a TECO implementation in Emacs Lisp (to find it, see Packages that do not come with Emacs); it would be an interesting project to run the original TECO Emacs inside of Emacs.
For some not-so-serious alternative reasons for Emacs to have that name, check out the file etc/JOKES (see File-name conventions).
Emacs 23.1 is the current version as of this writing. A version number with two components (e.g. ‘22.1’) indicates a released version; three components indicate a development version (e.g. ‘23.0.50’ is what will eventually become ‘23.1’).
Emacs is under active development, hosted at Savannah. The source code can be retrieved anonymously following the instructions. The primary repository is CVS, but Arch and Git mirrors are also available.
Because Emacs undergoes many changes before a release, the version number of a development version is not especially meaningful. It is better to refer to the date on which the sources were retrieved from the development repository.
The following sections list some of the major new features in the last few Emacs releases. For full details of the changes in any version of Emacs, type C-h C-n (M-x view-emacs-news). As of Emacs 22, you can give this command a prefix argument to read about which features were new in older versions.
Other changes include: support for serial port access; D-Bus bindings; a new Visual Line mode for line-motion; improved completion; a new mode (‘DocView’) for viewing of PDF, PostScript, and DVI documents; nXML mode (for editing XML documents) is included; VC has been updated for newer version control systems; etc. As always, consult the NEWS file for more information.
The following language environments have also been added: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chinese-EUC-TW, Croatian, French, Georgian, Italian, Latin-6, Latin-7, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Russian, Slovenian, Swedish, Tajik, Tamil, UTF-8, Ukrainian, Welsh, and Windows-1255.
Emacs 21 features a thorough rewrite of the display engine. The new display engine supports variable-size fonts, images, and can play sounds on platforms which support that. As a result, the visual appearance of Emacs, when it runs on a windowed display, is much more reminiscent of modern GUI programs, and includes 3D widgets (used for the mode line and the scroll bars), a configurable and extensible toolbar, tooltips (a.k.a. balloon help), and other niceties.
In addition, Emacs 21 supports faces on text-only terminals. This means
that you can now have colors when you run Emacs on a GNU/Linux console
and on xterm with emacs -nw.
The differences between Emacs versions 18 and 19 were rather dramatic; the introduction of frames, faces, and colors on windowing systems was obvious to even the most casual user.
There are differences between Emacs versions 19 and 20 as well, but many are more subtle or harder to find. Among the changes are the inclusion of MULE code for languages that use non-Latin characters and for mixing several languages in the same document; the “Customize” facility for modifying variables without having to use Lisp; and automatic conversion of files from Macintosh, Microsoft, and Unix platforms.
see Init File.
In general, new Emacs users should not be provided with .emacs files, because this can cause confusing non-standard behavior. Then they send questions to help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org asking why Emacs isn't behaving as documented.
Emacs includes the Customize facility (see Using Customize). This allows users who are unfamiliar with Emacs Lisp to modify their .emacs files in a relatively straightforward way, using menus rather than Lisp code.
While Customize might indeed make it easier to configure Emacs, consider taking a bit of time to learn Emacs Lisp and modifying your .emacs directly. Simple configuration options are described rather completely in see Init File, for users interested in performing frequently requested, basic tasks.
Sometimes users are unsure as to where their .emacs file should be found. Visiting the file as ~/.emacs from Emacs will find the correct file.
The main Customize entry point is M-x customize <RET>. This command takes you to a buffer listing all the available Customize groups. From there, you can access all customizable options and faces, change their values, and save your changes to your init file. see Easy Customization.
If you know the name of the group in advance (e.g. “shell”), use M-x customize-group <RET>.
If you wish to customize a single option, use M-x customize-option <RET>. This command prompts you for the name of the option to customize, with completion.
In Emacs 21.1 and later, colors and faces are supported in non-windowed mode,
i.e. on Unix and GNU/Linux text-only terminals and consoles, and when
invoked as ‘emacs -nw’ on X, and MS-Windows. (Colors and faces were
supported in the MS-DOS port since Emacs 19.29.) Emacs automatically
detects color support at startup and uses it if available. If you think
that your terminal supports colors, but Emacs won't use them, check the
termcap entry for your display type for color-related
capabilities.
The command M-x list-colors-display pops up a window which exhibits all the colors Emacs knows about on the current display.
Syntax highlighting is on by default since version 22.1.
Start Emacs with the ‘-debug-init’ command-line option. This enables the Emacs Lisp debugger before evaluating your .emacs file, and places you in the debugger if something goes wrong. The top line in the trace-back buffer will be the error message, and the second or third line of that buffer will display the Lisp code from your .emacs file that caused the problem.
You can also evaluate an individual function or argument to a function in your .emacs file by moving the cursor to the end of the function or argument and typing C-x C-e (M-x eval-last-sexp).
Use C-h v (M-x describe-variable) to check the value of variables which you are trying to set or use.
By default, Emacs displays the current line number of the point in the
mode line. You can toggle this feature off or on with the command
M-x line-number-mode, or by setting the variable
line-number-mode. Note that Emacs will not display the line
number if the buffer's size in bytes is larger than the value of the
variable line-number-display-limit.
You can similarly display the current column with M-x column-number-mode, or by putting the form
(setq column-number-mode t)
in your .emacs file. This feature is off by default.
The "%c" format specifier in the variable mode-line-format
will insert the current column's value into the mode line. See the
documentation for mode-line-format (using C-h v
mode-line-format <RET>) for more information on how to set and use
this variable.
The ‘linum’ package (distributed with Emacs since version 23.1)
displays line numbers in the left margin, like the “set number”
capability of vi. The packages ‘setnu’ and
‘wb-line-number’ (not distributed with Emacs) also implement this
feature.
The contents of an Emacs frame's titlebar is controlled by the variable
frame-title-format, which has the same structure as the variable
mode-line-format. (Use C-h v or M-x
describe-variable to get information about one or both of these
variables.)
By default, the titlebar for a frame does contain the name of the buffer
currently being visited, except if there is a single frame. In such a
case, the titlebar contains Emacs invocation name and the name of the
machine at which Emacs was invoked. This is done by setting
frame-title-format to the default value of
(multiple-frames "%b" ("" invocation-name "@" system-name))
To modify the behavior such that frame titlebars contain the buffer's name regardless of the number of existing frames, include the following in your .emacs:
(setq frame-title-format "%b")
Abbrev mode expands abbreviations as you type them. To turn it on in a specific buffer, use M-x abbrev-mode. To turn it on in every buffer by default, put this in your .emacs file:
(setq-default abbrev-mode t)
To turn it on in a specific mode, use:
(add-hook 'mymode-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq abbrev-mode t)))
If your Emacs version is older then 22.1, you will also need to use:
(condition-case ()
(quietly-read-abbrev-file)
(file-error nil))
If you want to use a certain mode foo for all files whose names end with the extension .bar, this will do it for you:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.bar\\'" . foo-mode))
Alternatively, put this somewhere in the first line of any file you want to edit in the mode foo (in the second line, if the first line begins with ‘#!’):
-*- foo -*-
The variable interpreter-mode-alist specifies which mode to use
when loading an interpreted script (e.g. shell, python, etc.). Emacs
determines which interpreter you're using by examining the first line of
the script. Use C-h v (or M-x describe-variable) on
interpreter-mode-alist to learn more.
You can cause the region to be highlighted when the mark is active by including
(transient-mark-mode 1)
in your .emacs file. Since Emacs 23.1, this feature is on by default.
Use delete-selection-mode, which you can start automatically by
placing the following Lisp form in your .emacs file:
(delete-selection-mode 1)
According to the documentation string for delete-selection-mode
(which you can read using M-x describe-function <RET>
delete-selection-mode <RET>):
When Delete Selection mode is enabled, Transient Mark mode is also enabled and typed text replaces the selection if the selection is active. Otherwise, typed text is just inserted at point regardless of any selection.
This mode also allows you to delete (not kill) the highlighted region by pressing <DEL>.
The value of the variable case-fold-search determines whether
searches are case sensitive:
(setq case-fold-search nil) ; make searches case sensitive
(setq case-fold-search t) ; make searches case insensitive
Similarly, for replacing, the variable case-replace determines
whether replacements preserve case.
You can also toggle case sensitivity at will in isearch with M-c.
To change the case sensitivity just for one major mode, use the major mode's hook. For example:
(add-hook 'foo-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq case-fold-search nil)))
To search for a single character that appears in the buffer as, for example, ‘\237’, you can type C-s C-q 2 3 7. Searching for all unprintable characters is best done with a regular expression (regexp) search. The easiest regexp to use for the unprintable chars is the complement of the regexp for the printable chars.
To type these special characters in an interactive argument to
isearch-forward-regexp or re-search-forward, you need to
use C-q. (‘\t’, ‘\n’, ‘\r’, and ‘\f’ stand
respectively for <TAB>, <LFD>, <RET>, and C-l.) So,
to search for unprintable characters using re-search-forward:
M-x re-search-forward <RET> [^ <TAB> C-q <LFD> C-q <RET> C-q C-l <SPC> -~] <RET>
Using isearch-forward-regexp:
C-M-s [^ <TAB> <LFD> C-q <RET> C-q C-l <SPC> -~]
To delete all unprintable characters, simply use replace-regexp:
M-x replace-regexp <RET> [^ <TAB> C-q <LFD> C-q <RET> C-q C-l <SPC> -~] <RET> <RET>
Replacing is similar to the above. To replace all unprintable characters with a colon, use:
M-x replace-regexp <RET> [^ <TAB> C-q <LFD> C-q <RET> C-q C-l <SPC> -~] <RET> : <RET>
Use C-q C-j. For more information, see see Special Input for Incremental Search.
Use M-y. see Isearch Yanking.
Use auto-fill-mode, activated by typing M-x auto-fill-mode.
The default maximum line width is 70, determined by the variable
fill-column. To learn how to turn this on automatically, see
Turning on auto-fill by default.
auto-fill-mode by default?
To turn on auto-fill-mode just once for one buffer, use M-x
auto-fill-mode.
To turn it on for every buffer in a certain mode, you must use the hook
for that mode. For example, to turn on auto-fill mode for all
text buffers, including the following in your .emacs file:
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
If you want auto-fill mode on in all major modes, do this:
(setq-default auto-fill-function 'do-auto-fill)
load-path?
In general, you should only add to the load-path. You can add
directory /dir/subdir to the load path like this:
(add-to-list 'load-path "/dir/subdir/")
To do this relative to your home directory:
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/mysubdir/")
emacsclient, which comes with Emacs, is for editing a file using
an already running Emacs rather than starting up a new Emacs. It does
this by sending a request to the already running Emacs, which must be
expecting the request.
Emacs must have executed the server-start function for
‘emacsclient’ to work. This can be done either by a command line
option:
emacs -f server-start
or by invoking server-start from .emacs:
(if (some conditions are met) (server-start))
When this is done, Emacs creates a Unix domain socket named
server in /tmp/emacsuserid. See
server-socket-dir.
To get your news reader, mail reader, etc., to invoke
‘emacsclient’, try setting the environment variable EDITOR
(or sometimes VISUAL) to the value ‘emacsclient’. You may
have to specify the full pathname of the ‘emacsclient’ program
instead. Examples:
# csh commands:
setenv EDITOR emacsclient
# using full pathname
setenv EDITOR /usr/local/emacs/etc/emacsclient
# sh command:
EDITOR=emacsclient ; export EDITOR
When ‘emacsclient’ is run, it connects to the socket and passes its
command line options to Emacs, which at the next opportunity will visit
the files specified. (Line numbers can be specified just like with
Emacs.) The user will have to switch to the Emacs window by hand. When
the user is done editing a file, the user can type C-x # (or
M-x server-edit) to indicate this. If there is another buffer
requested by emacsclient, Emacs will switch to it; otherwise
emacsclient will exit, signaling the calling program to continue.
There is an alternative version of ‘emacsclient’ called ‘gnuserv’, written by Andy Norman (see Packages that do not come with Emacs). ‘gnuserv’ uses Internet domain sockets, so it can work across most network connections.
The most recent ‘gnuserv’ package is available at
Customize the compilation-error-regexp-alist variable.
switch?
Many people want to indent their switch statements like this:
f()
{
switch(x) {
case A:
x1;
break;
case B:
x2;
break;
default:
x3;
}
}
To achieve this, add the following line to your .emacs:
(c-set-offset 'case-label '+)
The Emacs cc-mode features an interactive procedure for
customizing the indentation style, which is fully explained in the
CC Mode manual that is part of the Emacs distribution, see
Customization Indentation. Here's a short summary of the procedure:
0+-++--*/(c-set-offset 'syntactic-symbol offset)
where syntactic-symbol is the name Emacs shows in the minibuffer
when you type C-c C-o at the beginning of the line, and
offset is one of the indentation symbols listed above (+,
/, 0, etc.) that you've chosen during the interactive
procedure.
It is recommended to put all the resulting (c-set-offset ...)
customizations inside a C mode hook, like this:
(defun my-c-mode-hook ()
(c-set-offset ...)
(c-set-offset ...))
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'my-c-mode-hook)
Using c-mode-hook avoids the need to put a (require 'cc-mode) into your .emacs file, because c-set-offset
might be unavailable when cc-mode is not loaded.
Note that c-mode-hook runs for C source files only; use
c++-mode-hook for C++ sources, java-mode-hook for
Java sources, etc. If you want the same customizations to be in
effect in all languages supported by cc-mode, use
c-mode-common-hook.
In Emacs 21 and later, this is on by default: if the variable
truncate-lines is non-nil in the current buffer, Emacs
automatically scrolls the display horizontally when point moves off the
left or right edge of the window.
Note that this is overridden by the variable
truncate-partial-width-windows if that variable is non-nil
and the current buffer is not full-frame width.
In Emacs 20, use hscroll-mode.
M-x overwrite-mode (a minor mode). This toggles
overwrite-mode on and off, so exiting from overwrite-mode
is as easy as another M-x overwrite-mode.
On some systems, <Insert> toggles overwrite-mode on and off.
Martin R. Frank writes:
Tell Emacs to use the visible bell instead of the audible bell, and set the visible bell to nothing.
That is, put the following in your TERMCAP environment variable
(assuming you have one):
... :vb=: ...
And evaluate the following Lisp form:
(setq visible-bell t)
On X Window system, you can adjust the bell volume and duration for all
programs with the shell command xset.
Invoking xset without any arguments produces some basic
information, including the following:
usage: xset [-display host:dpy] option ...
To turn bell off:
-b b off b 0
To set bell volume, pitch and duration:
b [vol [pitch [dur]]] b on
Such behavior is automatic (in Text mode) in Emacs 20 and later. From the etc/NEWS file for Emacs 20.2:
** In Text mode, now only blank lines separate paragraphs. This makes
it possible to get the full benefit of Adaptive Fill mode in Text mode,
and other modes derived from it (such as Mail mode). <TAB> in Text
mode now runs the command indent-relative; this makes a practical
difference only when you use indented paragraphs.
If you want spaces at the beginning of a line to start a paragraph, use
the new mode, Paragraph Indent Text mode.
If you have auto-fill-mode turned on (see Turning on auto-fill by default), you can tell Emacs to prefix every line with a certain
character sequence, the fill prefix. Type the prefix at the
beginning of a line, position point after it, and then type C-x .
(set-fill-prefix) to set the fill prefix. Thereafter,
auto-filling will automatically put the fill prefix at the beginning of
new lines, and M-q (fill-paragraph) will maintain any fill
prefix when refilling the paragraph.
If you have paragraphs with different levels of indentation, you will have to set the fill prefix to the correct value each time you move to a new paragraph. There are many packages available to deal with this (see Packages that do not come with Emacs). Look for “fill” and “indent” keywords for guidance.
Call show-paren-mode in your .emacs file:
(show-paren-mode 1)
You can also enable this mode by selecting the ‘Paren Match Highlighting’ option from the ‘Options’ menu of the Emacs menu bar at the top of any Emacs frame.
Alternatives to this mode include:
forward-sexp) and C-M-b (backward-sexp)
will skip over one set of balanced parentheses, so you can see which
parentheses match. (You can train it to skip over balanced brackets
and braces at the same time by modifying the syntax table.)
vi. In addition, if the cursor isn't over a
parenthesis, it simply inserts a % like normal.
;; By an unknown contributor
(global-set-key "%" 'match-paren)
(defun match-paren (arg)
"Go to the matching paren if on a paren; otherwise insert %."
(interactive "p")
(cond ((looking-at "\\s\(") (forward-list 1) (backward-char 1))
((looking-at "\\s\)") (forward-char 1) (backward-list 1))
(t (self-insert-command (or arg 1)))))
#ifdef commands are handled by the compiler?M-x hide-ifdef-mode. (This is a minor mode.) You might also want to investigate cpp.el, which is distributed with Emacs.
As of Emacs 20.3, there is indeed a repeat command (C-x z)
that repeats the last command. If you preface it with a prefix
argument, the prefix arg is applied to the command.
You can also type C-x <ESC> <ESC>
(repeat-complex-command) to reinvoke commands that used the
minibuffer to get arguments. In repeat-complex-command you can
type M-p and M-n (and also up-arrow and down-arrow, if your
keyboard has these keys) to scan through all the different complex
commands you've typed.
To repeat a set of commands, use keyboard macros. Use C-x ( and C-x ) to make a keyboard macro that invokes the command and then type C-x e. (see Keyboard Macros.)
If you're really desperate for the . command in vi that
redoes the last insertion/deletion, use VIPER, a vi emulation
mode which comes with Emacs, and which appears to support it.
see X Resources.
You can also use a resource editor, such as editres (for X11R5 and onwards), to look at the resource names for the menu bar, assuming Emacs was compiled with the X toolkit.
There are a number of ways to execute (evaluate, in Lisp lingo) an Emacs Lisp form:
emacs-lisp-mode, typing C-M-x evaluates a top-level form
before or around point.
load
instead.)
The functions load-library, eval-region,
eval-buffer, require, and autoload are also
useful; see Emacs Lisp documentation, if you want to learn more
about them.
Set the variable default-tab-width. For example, to set
<TAB> stops every 10 characters, insert the following in your
.emacs file:
(setq default-tab-width 10)
Do not confuse variable tab-width with variable
tab-stop-list. The former is used for the display of literal
<TAB> characters. The latter controls what characters are inserted
when you press the <TAB> character in certain modes.
To do this to an entire buffer, type M-< M-x replace-regexp <RET> ^ <RET> your text <RET>.
To do this to a region, use string-insert-rectangle.
Set the mark (C-<SPC>) at the beginning of the first line you
want to prefix, move the cursor to last line to be prefixed, and type
M-x string-insert-rectangle <RET>. To do this for the whole
buffer, type C-x h M-x string-insert-rectangle <RET>.
If you are trying to prefix a yanked mail message with ‘>’, you
might want to set the variable mail-yank-prefix. In Message
buffers, you can even use M-; to cite yanked messages (M-;
runs the function comment-region, it is a general-purpose
mechanism to comment regions) (see Changing the included text prefix).
See also the variable track-eol and the command
set-goal-column bound to C-x C-n
(see Moving Point).
C-z iconifies Emacs when running under X and suspends Emacs otherwise. see Frame Commands.
see Regexp Backslash.
The or operator is ‘\|’, not ‘|’, and the grouping operators
are ‘\(’ and ‘\)’. Also, the string syntax for a backslash is
‘\\’. To specify a regular expression like ‘xxx\(foo\|bar\)’
in a Lisp string, use ‘xxx\\(foo\\|bar\\)’.
Note the doubled backslashes!
Dired mode (M-x dired <RET>, or C-x d) supports the
command dired-do-query-replace-regexp (Q), which allows
users to replace regular expressions in multiple files.
You can use this command to perform search/replace operations on multiple files by following the following steps:
find-dired, find-name-dired or find-grep-dired.
query-replace-regexp session on the marked
files.
Another way to do the same thing is to use the “tags” feature of
Emacs: it includes the command tags-query-replace which performs
a query-replace across all the files mentioned in the TAGS file.
see Tags Search.
etags?
The etags man page should be in the same place as the
emacs man page.
Quick command-line switch descriptions are also available. For example, ‘etags -H’.
You probably don't want to do this, since backups are useful, especially when something goes wrong.
To avoid seeing backup files (and other “uninteresting” files) in Dired,
load dired-x by adding the following to your .emacs file:
(add-hook 'dired-load-hook
(lambda ()
(require 'dired-x)))
With dired-x loaded, M-o toggles omitting in each dired buffer.
You can make omitting the default for new dired buffers by putting the
following in your .emacs:
(add-hook 'dired-mode-hook 'dired-omit-toggle)
If you're tired of seeing backup files whenever you do an ‘ls’ at
the Unix shell, try GNU ls with the ‘-B’ option. GNU
ls is part of the GNU Fileutils package, available from
‘ftp.gnu.org’ and its mirrors (see Current GNU distributions).
To disable or change the way backups are made, see Backup Names.
Beginning with Emacs 21.1, you can control where Emacs puts backup files
by customizing the variable backup-directory-alist. This
variable's value specifies that files whose names match specific patters
should have their backups put in certain directories. A typical use is
to add the element ("." . dir) to force Emacs to put
all backup files in the directory dir.
auto-save-mode?You probably don't want to do this, since auto-saving is useful, especially when Emacs or your computer crashes while you are editing a document.
Instead, you might want to change the variable
auto-save-interval, which specifies how many keystrokes Emacs
waits before auto-saving. Increasing this value forces Emacs to wait
longer between auto-saves, which might annoy you less.
You might also want to look into Sebastian Kremer's auto-save
package (see Packages that do not come with Emacs). This
package also allows you to place all auto-save files in one directory,
such as /tmp.
To disable or change how auto-save-mode works, see Auto Save.
Are you sure you indeed need to go to a line by its number? Perhaps all
you want is to display a line in your source file for which a compiler
printed an error message? If so, compiling from within Emacs using the
M-x compile and M-x recompile commands is a much more
effective way of doing that. Emacs automatically intercepts the compile
error messages, inserts them into a special buffer called
*compilation*, and lets you visit the locus of each message in
the source. Type C-x ` to step through the offending lines one by
one (starting with Emacs 22, you can also use M-g M-p and
M-g M-n to go to the previous and next matches directly). Click
Mouse-2 or press <RET> on a message text in the
*compilation* buffer to go to the line whose number is mentioned
in that message.
But if you indeed need to go to a certain text line, type M-g M-g
(which is the default binding of the goto-line function starting
with Emacs 22). Emacs will prompt you for the number of the line and go
to that line.
You can do this faster by invoking goto-line with a numeric
argument that is the line's number. For example, C-u 286 M-g M-g
will jump to line number 286 in the current buffer.
Each menu title (e.g., ‘File’, ‘Edit’, ‘Buffers’)
represents a local or global keymap. Selecting a menu title with the
mouse displays that keymap's non-nil contents in the form of a menu.
So to add a menu option to an existing menu, all you have to do is add a new definition to the appropriate keymap. Adding a ‘Forward Word’ item to the ‘Edit’ menu thus requires the following Lisp code:
(define-key global-map
[menu-bar edit forward]
'("Forward word" . forward-word))
The first line adds the entry to the global keymap, which includes
global menu bar entries. Replacing the reference to global-map
with a local keymap would add this menu option only within a particular
mode.
The second line describes the path from the menu-bar to the new entry.
Placing this menu entry underneath the ‘File’ menu would mean
changing the word edit in the second line to file.
The third line is a cons cell whose first element is the title that will be displayed, and whose second element is the function that will be called when that menu option is invoked.
To add a new menu, rather than a new option to an existing menu, we must define an entirely new keymap:
(define-key global-map [menu-bar words]
(cons "Words" (make-sparse-keymap "Words")))
The above code creates a new sparse keymap, gives it the name ‘Words’, and attaches it to the global menu bar. Adding the ‘Forward Word’ item to this new menu would thus require the following code:
(define-key global-map
[menu-bar words forward]
'("Forward word" . forward-word))
Note that because of the way keymaps work, menu options are displayed with the more recently defined items at the top. Thus if you were to define menu options ‘foo’, ‘bar’, and ‘baz’ (in that order), the menu option ‘baz’ would appear at the top, and ‘foo’ would be at the bottom.
One way to avoid this problem is to use the function define-key-after,
which works the same as define-key, but lets you modify where items
appear. The following Lisp code would insert the ‘Forward Word’
item in the ‘Edit’ menu immediately following the ‘Undo’ item:
(define-key-after
(lookup-key global-map [menu-bar edit])
[forward]
'("Forward word" . forward-word)
'undo)
Note how the second and third arguments to define-key-after are
different from those of define-key, and that we have added a new
(final) argument, the function after which our new key should be
defined.
To move a menu option from one position to another, simply evaluate
define-key-after with the appropriate final argument.
More detailed information—and more examples of how to create and modify menu options—are in the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, under “Menu Keymaps.” (See Emacs Lisp documentation, for information on this manual.)
The simplest way to remove a menu is to set its keymap to ‘nil’. For example, to delete the ‘Words’ menu (see Modifying pull-down menus), use:
(define-key global-map [menu-bar words] nil)
Similarly, removing a menu option requires redefining a keymap entry to
nil. For example, to delete the ‘Forward word’ menu option
from the ‘Edit’ menu (we added it in Modifying pull-down menus), use:
(define-key global-map [menu-bar edit forward] nil)
font-lock-mode is the standard way to have Emacs perform syntax
highlighting in the current buffer. It is enabled by default in Emacs
22.1 and later.
With font-lock-mode turned on, different types of text will
appear in different colors. For instance, in a programming mode,
variables will appear in one face, keywords in a second, and comments in
a third.
To turn font-lock-mode off within an existing buffer, use
M-x font-lock-mode <RET>.
In Emacs 21 and earlier versions, you could use the following code in
your .emacs file to turn on font-lock-mode globally:
(global-font-lock-mode 1)
Highlighting a buffer with font-lock-mode can take quite a while,
and cause an annoying delay in display, so several features exist to
work around this.
In Emacs 21 and later, turning on font-lock-mode automatically
activates the new Just-In-Time fontification provided by
jit-lock-mode. jit-lock-mode defers the fontification of
portions of buffer until you actually need to see them, and can also
fontify while Emacs is idle. This makes display of the visible portion
of a buffer almost instantaneous. For details about customizing
jit-lock-mode, type C-h f jit-lock-mode <RET>.
In versions of Emacs before 21, different levels of decoration are
available, from slight to gaudy. More decoration means you need to wait
more time for a buffer to be fontified (or a faster machine). To
control how decorated your buffers should become, set the value of
font-lock-maximum-decoration in your .emacs file, with a
nil value indicating default (usually minimum) decoration, and a
t value indicating the maximum decoration. For the gaudiest
possible look, then, include the line
(setq font-lock-maximum-decoration t)
in your .emacs file. You can also set this variable such that
different modes are highlighted in a different ways; for more
information, see the documentation for
font-lock-maximum-decoration with C-h v (or M-x
describe-variable <RET>).
Also see the documentation for the function font-lock-mode,
available by typing C-h f font-lock-mode (M-x
describe-function <RET> font-lock-mode <RET>).
To print buffers with the faces (i.e., colors and fonts) intact, use
M-x ps-print-buffer-with-faces or M-x
ps-print-region-with-faces. You will need a way to send text to a
PostScript printer, or a PostScript interpreter such as Ghostscript;
consult the documentation of the variables ps-printer-name,
ps-lpr-command, and ps-lpr-switches for more details.
Customize the scroll-conservatively variable with M-x
customize-variable <RET> scroll-conservatively <RET> and set it
to a large value like, say, 10000. For an explanation of what this
means, see Auto Scrolling.
Alternatively, use the following Lisp form in your .emacs:
(setq scroll-conservatively most-positive-fixnum)
As of Emacs 20, detection and handling of MS-DOS (and Windows) files is performed transparently. You can open MS-DOS files on a Unix system, edit it, and save it without having to worry about the file format.
When editing an MS-DOS style file, the mode line will indicate that it is a DOS file. On Unix and GNU/Linux systems, and also on a Macintosh, the string ‘(DOS)’ will appear near the left edge of the mode line; on DOS and Windows, where the DOS end-of-line (EOL) format is the default, a backslash (‘\’) will appear in the mode line.
Add the following line to your .emacs file:
(setq sentence-end-double-space nil)
ls from the Shell mode?
This happens because ls is aliased to ‘ls --color’ in your
shell init file. You have two alternatives to solve this:
EMACS variable in the
environment. When Emacs runs a subsidiary shell, it exports the
EMACS variable to that shell, with value equal to the absolute
file name of Emacs. You can
unalias ls when that happens, thus limiting the alias to your
interactive sessions.
ansi-color package (bundled with Emacs 21.1 and
later), which converts these ANSI escape sequences into colors.
Use the function w32-send-sys-command. For example, you can
put the following in your .emacs file:
(add-hook 'term-setup-hook
#'(lambda () (w32-send-sys-command ?\xF030)))
To avoid the slightly distracting visual effect of Emacs starting with its default frame size and then growing to fullscreen, you can add an ‘Emacs.Geometry’ entry to the Windows registry settings (see see (emacs)X Resources).
To compute the correct values for width and height, first maximize the
Emacs frame and then evaluate (frame-height) and
(frame-width) with M-:.
The Emacs manual lists some common kinds of trouble users could get into, see Dealing with Emacs Trouble, so you might look there if the problem you encounter isn't described in this chapter. If you decide you've discovered a bug, see Reporting Bugs, for instructions how to do that.
The file etc/PROBLEMS in the Emacs distribution lists various known problems with building and using Emacs on specific platforms; type C-h C-p to read it.
Old versions (i.e., anything before 19.29) of Emacs had problems editing files larger than 8 megabytes. In versions 19.29 and later, the maximum buffer size is at least 2^27-1, or 134,217,727 bytes, or 132 MBytes. And in Emacs 22, the maximum buffer size has been increased to 268,435,455 bytes (or 256 MBytes) on 32-bit machines.
Emacs compiled on a 64-bit machine can handle much larger buffers.
Try typing M-x shell-strip-ctrl-m <RET> while in shell-mode to
make them go away. If that doesn't work, you have several options:
For tcsh, put this in your .cshrc (or .tcshrc)
file:
if ($?EMACS) then
if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
if ($?tcsh) unset edit
stty nl
endif
endif
Or put this in your .emacs_tcsh or ~/.emacs.d/init_tcsh.sh file:
unset edit
stty nl
Alternatively, use csh in your shell buffers instead of
tcsh. One way is:
(setq explicit-shell-file-name "/bin/csh")
and another is to do this in your .cshrc (or .tcshrc) file:
setenv ESHELL /bin/csh
(You must start Emacs over again with the environment variable properly set for this to take effect.)
You can also set the ESHELL environment variable in Emacs Lisp
with the following Lisp form,
(setenv "ESHELL" "/bin/csh")
The above solutions try to prevent the shell from producing the ‘^M’ characters in the first place. If this is not possible (e.g., if you use a Windows shell), you can get Emacs to remove these characters from the buffer by adding this to your .emacs init file:
(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'shell-strip-ctrl-m)
On a related note: if your shell is echoing your input line in the shell
buffer, you might want to customize the comint-process-echoes
variable in your shell buffers, or try the following command in your
shell start-up file:
stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
This might happen because Emacs tries to look for the shell in a wrong
place. If you know where your shell executable is, set the variable
explicit-shell-file-name in your .emacs file to point to
its full file name.
Some people have trouble with Shell Mode on MS-Windows because of intrusive antivirus software; disabling the resident antivirus program solves the problems in those cases.
The termcap entry for terminal type ‘emacs’ is ordinarily put in the ‘TERMCAP’ environment variable of subshells. It may help in certain situations (e.g., using rlogin from shell buffer) to add an entry for ‘emacs’ to the system-wide termcap file. Here is a correct termcap entry for ‘emacs’:
emacs:tc=unknown:
To make a terminfo entry for ‘emacs’, use tic or
captoinfo. You need to generate
/usr/lib/terminfo/e/emacs. It may work to simply copy
/usr/lib/terminfo/d/dumb to /usr/lib/terminfo/e/emacs.
Having a termcap/terminfo entry will not enable the use of full screen programs in shell buffers. Use M-x terminal-emulator for that instead.
A workaround to the problem of missing termcap/terminfo entries is to
change terminal type ‘emacs’ to type ‘dumb’ or ‘unknown’
in your shell start up file. csh users could put this in their
.cshrc files:
if ("$term" == emacs) set term=dumb
An error occurred while loading either your .emacs file or the system-wide file site-lisp/default.el. Emacs 21.1 and later pops the *Messages* buffer, and puts there some additional information about the error, to provide some hints for debugging.
For information on how to debug your .emacs file, see Debugging a customization file.
It may be the case that you need to load some package first, or use a hook that will be evaluated after the package is loaded. A common case of this is explained in Terminal setup code works after Emacs has begun.
As of version 19, Emacs searches for X resources in the files specified by the following environment variables:
XFILESEARCHPATH
XUSERFILESEARCHPATH
XAPPLRESDIR
This emulates the functionality provided by programs written using the Xt toolkit.
XFILESEARCHPATH and XUSERFILESEARCHPATH should be a list
of file names separated by colons. XAPPLRESDIR should be a list
of directory names separated by colons.
Emacs searches for X resources:
LANG
environment variable), if the ‘LANG’ environment variable is set,
LANG environment variable
is set),
XFILESEARCHPATH.
This probably happens because you have set the frame parameters in the
variable initial-frame-alist. That variable holds parameters
used only for the first frame created when Emacs starts. To customize
the parameters of all frames, change the variable
default-frame-alist instead.
These two variables exist because many users customize the initial frame in a special way. For example, you could determine the position and size of the initial frame, but would like to control the geometry of the other frames by individually positioning each one of them.
When entering a file name in the minibuffer, Emacs will attempt to expand a ‘$’ followed by a word as an environment variable. To suppress this behavior, type $$ instead.
Emacs has no way of knowing when the shell actually changes its directory. This is an intrinsic limitation of Unix. So it tries to guess by recognizing ‘cd’ commands. If you type cd followed by a directory name with a variable reference (cd $HOME/bin) or with a shell metacharacter (cd ../lib*), Emacs will fail to correctly guess the shell's new current directory. A huge variety of fixes and enhancements to shell mode for this problem have been written to handle this problem (see Finding a package with particular functionality).
You can tell Emacs the shell's current directory with the command M-x dirs.
In his book The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll describes this in
chapter 4. The site at LBL had installed the /etc/movemail
program setuid root. (As of version 19, movemail is in your
architecture-specific directory; type C-h v exec-directory
<RET> to see what it is.) Since movemail had not been
designed for this situation, a security hole was created and users could
get root privileges.
movemail has since been changed so that this security hole will
not exist, even if it is installed setuid root. However,
movemail no longer needs to be installed setuid root, which
should eliminate this particular risk.
We have heard unverified reports that the 1988 Internet worm took advantage of this configuration problem.
file-local-variable feature. (Yes, a risk, but easy to
change.)
There is an Emacs feature that allows the setting of local values for variables when editing a file by including specially formatted text near the end of the file. This feature also includes the ability to have arbitrary Emacs Lisp code evaluated when the file is visited. Obviously, there is a potential for Trojan horses to exploit this feature.
As of Emacs 22, Emacs has a list of local variables that are known to
be safe to set. If a file tries to set any variable outside this
list, it asks the user to confirm whether the variables should be set.
You can also tell Emacs whether to allow the evaluation of Emacs Lisp
code found at the bottom of files by setting the variable
enable-local-eval.
For more information, see File Variables.
Emacs accepts synthetic X events generated by the SendEvent
request as though they were regular events. As a result, if you are
using the trivial host-based authentication, other users who can open X
connections to your X workstation can make your Emacs process do
anything, including run other processes with your privileges.
The only fix for this is to prevent other users from being able to open
X connections. The standard way to prevent this is to use a real
authentication mechanism, such as ‘MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1’. If using
the xauth program has any effect, then you are probably using
‘MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1’. Your site may be using a superior
authentication method; ask your system administrator.
If real authentication is not a possibility, you may be satisfied by just allowing hosts access for brief intervals while you start your X programs, then removing the access. This reduces the risk somewhat by narrowing the time window when hostile users would have access, but does not eliminate the risk.
On most computers running Unix and X, you enable and disable
access using the xhost command. To allow all hosts access to
your X server, use
xhost +
at the shell prompt, which (on an HP machine, at least) produces the following message:
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host
To deny all hosts access to your X server (except those explicitly allowed by name), use
xhost -
On the test HP computer, this command generated the following message:
access control enabled, only authorized clients can connect
Dired uses a regular expression to find the beginning of a file name. In a long Unix-style directory listing (‘ls -l’), the file name starts after the date. The regexp has thus been written to look for the date. By default, it should understand dates and times regardless of the language, but if your directory listing has an unusual format, Dired may get confused.
There are two approaches to solving this. The first one involves setting things up so that ‘ls -l’ outputs a more standard format. See your OS manual for more information.
The second approach involves changing the regular expression used by
dired, directory-listing-before-filename-regexp.
This answer is meant for users of Unix and Unix-like systems. Users of other operating systems should see the series of questions beginning with Emacs for MS-DOS, which describe where to get non-Unix source and binaries, and how to install Emacs on those systems.
Most GNU/Linux distributions provide pre-built Emacs packages. If Emacs is not installed already, you can install it by running (as root) a command such as ‘yum install emacs’ (Red Hat and derivatives) or ‘apt-get install emacs’ (Debian and derivatives).
If you want to compile Emacs yourself, read the file INSTALL in the source distribution. In brief:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/emacs-VERSION.tar.gz
(Replace ‘VERSION’ with the relevant version number, e.g. ‘23.1’.)
gzip and tar programs, which are standard utilities.
If your system does not have them, these can also be downloaded from
ftp.gnu.org.
GNU tar can uncompress and extract in a single-step:
tar -zxvf emacs-VERSION.tar.gz
cd emacs-VERSION
./configure # configure Emacs for your particular system
make # use Makefile to build components, then Emacs
If the make completes successfully, the odds are fairly good that
the build has gone well. (See Problems building Emacs, if you weren't
successful.)
make install
Note that ‘make install’ will overwrite /usr/local/bin/emacs and any Emacs Info files that might be in /usr/local/share/info/.
First look in the file etc/PROBLEMS (where you unpack the Emacs source) to see if there is already a solution for your problem. Next, look for other questions in this FAQ that have to do with Emacs installation and compilation problems.
If you'd like to have someone look at your problem and help solve it, see Help installing Emacs.
If you cannot find a solution in the documentation, please report the problem (see Reporting bugs).
Information on downloading Emacs is available at the Emacs home-page.
See Installing Emacs, for information on how to obtain and build the latest version of Emacs, and see Current GNU distributions, for a list of archive sites that make GNU software available.
First of all, you should check to make sure that the package isn't already available. For example, typing M-x apropos <RET> wordstar <RET> lists all functions and variables containing the string ‘wordstar’.
It is also possible that the package is on your system, but has not been loaded. To see which packages are available for loading, look through your computer's lisp directory (see File-name conventions). The Lisp source to most packages contains a short description of how they should be loaded, invoked, and configured—so before you use or modify a Lisp package, see if the author has provided any hints in the source code.
The command C-h p (finder-by-keyword) allows you to browse
the constituent Emacs packages.
For advice on how to find extra packages that are not part of Emacs, see Packages that do not come with Emacs.
The Emacs Lisp List (ELL), maintained by Stephen Eglen, aims to provide one compact list with links to all of the current Emacs Lisp files on the Internet. The ELL can be browsed over the web, or from Emacs with the ell package.
Many authors post their packages to the Emacs sources newsgroup. You can search the archives of this group with Google, or Gmane, for example.
Several packages are stored in the Lisp area of the Emacs Wiki.
Read the file etc/MORE.STUFF for more information about external packages.
The most up-to-date official GNU software is normally kept at
A list of sites mirroring ‘ftp.gnu.org’ can be found at
http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
XEmacs is a branch version of Emacs. It was first called Lucid Emacs, and was initially derived from a prerelease version of Emacs 19. In this FAQ, we use the name “Emacs” only for the official version.
Emacs and XEmacs each come with Lisp packages that are lacking in the other. The two versions have some significant differences at the Lisp programming level. Their current features are roughly comparable, though the support for some operating systems, character sets and specific packages might be quite different.
Some XEmacs code has been contributed to Emacs, and we would like to use other parts, but the earlier XEmacs maintainers did not always keep track of the authors of contributed code, which makes it impossible for the FSF to get copyright papers signed for that code. (The FSF requires these papers for all the code included in the Emacs release, aside from generic C support packages that retain their separate identity and are not integrated into the code of Emacs proper.)
If you want to talk about these two versions and distinguish them, please call them “Emacs” and “XEmacs.” To contrast “XEmacs” with “GNU Emacs” would be misleading, since XEmacs too has its origin in the work of the GNU Project. Terms such as “Emacsen” and “(X)Emacs” are not wrong, but they are not very clear, so it is better to write “Emacs and XEmacs.”
GNU Zile is a lightweight Emacs clone. Zile is short for ‘Zile Is Lossy Emacs’. It has all of Emacs's basic editing features. The Zile binary typically has a size of about 130 kbytes, so this can be useful if you are in an extremely space-restricted environment. More information is available from
http://www.gnu.org/software/zile/
To build Emacs from source for MS-DOS, see the instructions in the file msdos/INSTALL in the distribution. The DOS port builds and runs on plain DOS, and also on all versions of MS-Windows from version 3.X onwards, including Windows XP and Vista.
The file etc/PROBLEMS contains some additional information regarding Emacs under MS-DOS.
A pre-built binary distribution of the old Emacs 20 is available, as described at
ftp://ftp.delorie.com/pub/djgpp/current/v2gnu/emacs.README
For a list of other MS-DOS implementations of Emacs (and Emacs look-alikes), consult the list of “Emacs implementations and literature,” available at
http://www.finseth.com/emacs.html
Note that while many of these programs look similar to Emacs, they often lack certain features, such as the Emacs Lisp extension language.
There is a separate FAQ for Emacs on MS-Windows. For MS-DOS, see Emacs for MS-DOS.
Beginning with version 23.1, Emacs supports GNUstep natively. See the file nextstep/INSTALL in the distribution.
Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports Mac OS X natively. See the file nextstep/INSTALL in the distribution.
VM was originally written by Kyle Jones. Older versions of VM remain available.
AUCTeX is a set of sophisticated major modes for TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and Texinfo offering context-sensitive syntax highlighting, indentation, formatting and folding, macro completion, TeX shell functionality, and debugging. Be also sure to check out RefTeX. Current versions of AUCTeX include the preview-latex package for WYSIWYG previews of various LaTeX constructs in the Emacs source buffer.
The Insidious Big Brother Database
Various spell-checkers are compatible with Emacs, including:
A Java Development Environment for Emacs
Keys can be bound to commands either interactively or in your .emacs file. To interactively bind keys for all modes, type M-x global-set-key <RET> key cmd <RET>.
To bind a key just in the current major mode, type M-x local-set-key <RET> key cmd <RET>.
see Key Bindings, for further details.
To make the process of binding keys interactively easier, use the following “trick”: First bind the key interactively, then immediately type C-x <ESC> <ESC> C-a C-k C-g. Now, the command needed to bind the key is in the kill ring, and can be yanked into your .emacs file. If the key binding is global, no changes to the command are required. For example,
(global-set-key (quote [f1]) (quote help-for-help))
can be placed directly into the .emacs file. If the key binding is local, the command is used in conjunction with the ‘add-hook’ function. For example, in TeX mode, a local binding might be
(add-hook 'tex-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(local-set-key (quote [f1]) (quote help-for-help))))
(global-unset-key [?\e ?{]) ;; or
(local-unset-key [?\e ?{])
(global-set-key [f10] [?\C-x?\e?\e?\C-a?\C-k?\C-g]) ;; or
(global-set-key [f10] "\C-x\e\e\C-a\C-k\C-g")
Usually, one of two things has happened. In one case, the control character in the key sequence has been misspecified (e.g. ‘C-f’ used instead of ‘\C-f’ within a Lisp expression). In the other case, a prefix key in the keystroke sequence you were trying to bind was already bound as a complete key. Historically, the ‘ESC [’ prefix was usually the problem, in which case you should evaluate either of these forms before attempting to bind the key sequence:
(global-unset-key [?\e ?[]) ;; or
(global-unset-key "\e[")
During startup, Emacs initializes itself according to a given code/file order. If some of the code executed in your .emacs file needs to be postponed until the initial terminal or window-system setup code has been executed but is not, then you will experience this problem (this code/file execution order is not enforced after startup).
To postpone the execution of Emacs Lisp code until after terminal or
window-system setup, treat the code as a lambda list and set the
value of either the term-setup-hook or window-setup-hook
variable to this lambda function. For example,
(add-hook 'term-setup-hook
(lambda ()
(when (string-match "\\`vt220" (or (getenv "TERM") ""))
;; Make vt220's "Do" key behave like M-x:
(global-set-key [do] 'execute-extended-command))))
For information on what Emacs does every time it is started, see the lisp/startup.el file.
Type C-h c then the function or arrow keys. The command will return either a function key symbol or character sequence (see the Emacs documentation for an explanation). This works for other keys as well.
Emacs is not written using the Xt library by default, so there are no “translations” to be set. (We aren't sure how to set such translations if you do build Emacs with Xt; please let us know if you've done this!)
The only way to affect the behavior of keys within Emacs is through
xmodmap (outside Emacs) or define-key (inside Emacs). The
define-key command should be used in conjunction with the
function-key-map map. For instance,
(define-key function-key-map [M-<TAB>] [?\M-\t])
defines the M-<TAB> key sequence.
The <Backspace> key (on most keyboards) generates ASCII code 8. C-h sends the same code. In Emacs by default C-h invokes help-command. This is intended to be easy to remember since the first letter of ‘help’ is ‘h’. The easiest solution to this problem is to use C-h (and <Backspace>) for help and <DEL> (the <Delete> key) for deleting the previous character.
For many people this solution may be problematic:
stty erase `^?'
normal-erase-is-backspace-mode, or by invoking M-x
normal-erase-is-backspace. See the documentation of these symbols
(see Emacs Lisp documentation) for more info.
(keyboard-translate ?\C-h ?\C-?)
This is the recommended method of forcing <Backspace> to act as
<DEL>, because it works even in modes which bind <DEL> to
something other than delete-backward-char.
Similarly, you could remap <DEL> to act as C-d, which by default deletes forward:
(keyboard-translate ?\C-? ?\C-d)
See Swapping keys, for further details about keyboard-translate.
(global-set-key "\C-h" 'delete-backward-char)
;; overrides mark-whole-buffer
(global-set-key "\C-xh" 'help-command)
This method is not recommended, though: it only solves the problem for
those modes which bind <DEL> to delete-backward-char. Modes
which bind <DEL> to something else, such as view-mode, will
not work as you expect when you press the <Backspace> key. For this
reason, we recommend the keyboard-translate method, shown
above.
Other popular key bindings for help are M-? and C-x ?.
Don't try to bind <DEL> to help-command, because there are
many modes that have local bindings of <DEL> that will interfere.
When Emacs 21 or later runs on a windowed display, it binds the <Delete> key to a command which deletes the character at point, to make Emacs more consistent with keyboard operation on these systems.
For more information about troubleshooting this problem, see If <DEL> Fails to Delete.
You can swap two keys (or key sequences) by using the
keyboard-translate function. For example, to turn C-h
into <DEL> and <DEL> to C-h, use
(keyboard-translate ?\C-h ?\C-?) ; translate `C-h' to DEL
(keyboard-translate ?\C-? ?\C-h) ; translate DEL to `C-h'.
The first key sequence of the pair after the function identifies what is produced by the keyboard; the second, what is matched for in the keymaps.
However, in the specific case of C-h and <DEL>, you should
toggle normal-erase-is-backspace-mode instead of calling
keyboard-translate. see DEL Does Not Delete.
Keyboard translations are not the same as key bindings in keymaps. Emacs contains numerous keymaps that apply in different situations, but there is only one set of keyboard translations, and it applies to every character that Emacs reads from the terminal. Keyboard translations take place at the lowest level of input processing; the keys that are looked up in keymaps contain the characters that result from keyboard translation.
On terminals (but not under X), some common “aliases” are:
Often other aliases exist; use the C-h c command and try <CTRL> with all of the digits on your keyboard to see what gets generated. You can also try the C-h w command if you know the name of the command.
On many keyboards, the <Alt> key acts as <Meta>, so try it.
Instead of typing M-a, you can type <ESC> a. In fact,
Emacs converts M-a internally into <ESC> a anyway
(depending on the value of meta-prefix-char). Note that you
press <Meta> and <a> together, but with <ESC>, you press
<ESC>, release it, and then press <a>.
Type C-[ instead. This should send ASCII code 27 just like an Escape key would. C-3 may also work on some terminal (but not under X). For many terminals (notably DEC terminals) <F11> generates <ESC>. If not, the following form can be used to bind it:
;; F11 is the documented ESC replacement on DEC terminals.
(define-key function-key-map [f11] [?\e])
On a dumb terminal such as a VT220, no. It is rumored that certain
VT220 clones could have their <Compose> key configured this way. If
you're using X, you might be able to do this with the xmodmap
command.
With Emacs 19 and later, you can represent modified function keys in vector format by adding prefixes to the function key symbol. For example (from the Emacs documentation):
(global-set-key [?\C-x right] 'forward-page)
where ‘?\C-x’ is the Lisp character constant for the character C-x.
You can use the modifier keys <Control>, <Meta>, <Hyper>, <Super>, <Alt>, and <Shift> with function keys. To represent these modifiers, prepend the strings ‘C-’, ‘M-’, ‘H-’, ‘s-’, ‘A-’, and ‘S-’ to the symbol name. Here is how to make H-M-RIGHT move forward a word:
(global-set-key [H-M-right] 'forward-word)
See Binding keys to commands, for general key binding instructions.
xterm window?see Single-Byte Character Set Support.
If the advice in the Emacs manual fails, try all of these methods before asking for further help:
mwm as your window manager.
(Does anyone know a good generic solution to allow the use of the
<Meta> key in Emacs with mwm?)
xev to
find out what keysym your <Meta> key generates. It should be either
Meta_L or Meta_R. If it isn't, use xmodmap to fix
the situation. If <Meta> does generate Meta_L or
Meta_R, but M-x produces a non-ASCII character, put this in
your ~/.Xdefaults file:
XTerm*eightBitInput: false
XTerm*eightBitOutput: true
pty the xterm is using is passing 8 bit
characters. ‘stty -a’ (or ‘stty everything’) should show
‘cs8’ somewhere. If it shows ‘cs7’ instead, use ‘stty
cs8 -istrip’ (or ‘stty pass8’) to fix it.
rlogin connection between xterm and Emacs, the
‘-8’ argument may need to be given to rlogin to make it pass all 8 bits
of every character.
(set-input-mode t nil) helps.
xterm generate <ESC> W when
you type M-W, which is the same conversion Emacs would make if it
got the M-W anyway. In X11R4, the following resource
specification will do this:
XTerm.VT100.EightBitInput: false
(This changes the behavior of the insert-eight-bit action.)
With older xterms, you can specify this behavior with a translation:
XTerm.VT100.Translations: #override \
Meta<KeyPress>: string(0x1b) insert()
You might have to replace ‘Meta’ with ‘Alt’.
This is a result of an internationalization extension in X11R4 and the
fact that HP is now using this extension. Emacs assumes that the
XLookupString function returns the same result regardless of the
<Meta> key state which is no longer necessarily true. Until Emacs
is fixed, the temporary kludge is to run this command after each time
the X server is started but preferably before any xterm clients are:
xmodmap -e 'remove mod1 = Mode_switch'
This will disable the use of the extra keysyms systemwide, which may be undesirable if you actually intend to use them.
Starting with Emacs 22.1, SPC no longer completes file names in the minibuffer, so that file names with embedded spaces could be typed without the need to quote the spaces.
You can get the old behavior by binding SPC to
minibuffer-complete-word in the minibuffer, as follows:
(define-key minibuffer-local-filename-completion-map (kbd "SPC")
'minibuffer-complete-word)
(define-key minibuffer-local-must-match-filename-map (kbd "SPC")
'minibuffer-complete-word)
see Single-byte Character Set Support. On a Unix, when Emacs runs on a text-only terminal
display or is invoked with ‘emacs -nw’, you typically need to use
set-terminal-coding-system to tell Emacs what the terminal can
display, even after setting the language environment; otherwise
non-ASCII characters will display as ‘?’. On other operating
systems, such as MS-DOS and MS-Windows, Emacs queries the OS about the
character set supported by the display, and sets up the required
terminal coding system automatically.
Various methods are available for input of eight-bit characters. See see Single-byte Character Set Support. For more sophisticated methods, see Input Methods.
Emacs supports Hebrew characters (ISO 8859-8) since version 20, but does not yet support right-to-left character entry and display. The emacs-bidi mailing list discusses development of support for this feature.
First, download and install the BDF font files and any auxiliary packages they need. The GNU Intlfonts distribution can be found on the GNU Software Directory Web site.
Next, if you are on X Window system, issue the following two commands from the shell's prompt:
xset +fp /usr/local/share/emacs/fonts
xset fp rehash
(Modify the first command if you installed the fonts in a directory that is not /usr/local/share/emacs/fonts.) You also need to arrange for these two commands to run whenever you log in, e.g., by adding them to your window-system startup file, such as ~/.xsessionrc or ~/.gnomerc.
Now, add the following line to your ~/.emacs init file:
(add-to-list 'bdf-directory-list "/usr/share/emacs/fonts/bdf")
(Again, modify the file name if you installed the fonts elsewhere.)
Finally, if you wish to use the installed fonts with ps-print,
add the following line to your ~/.emacs:
(setq ps-multibyte-buffer 'bdf-font-except-latin)
A few additional steps are necessary for MS-Windows; they are listed below.
First, make sure all the directories with BDF font files are
mentioned in bdf-directory-list. On Unix and GNU/Linux
systems, one normally runs make install to install the BDF fonts
in the same directory. By contrast, Windows users typically don't run
the Intlfonts installation command, but unpack the distribution in
some directory, which leaves the BDF fonts in its subdirectories. For
example, assume that you unpacked Intlfonts in C:/Intlfonts;
then you should set bdf-directory-list as follows:
(setq bdf-directory-list
'("C:/Intlfonts/Asian"
"C:/Intlfonts/Chinese" "C:/Intlfonts/Chinese.X"
"C:/Intlfonts/Chinese.BIG" "C:/Intlfonts/Ethiopic"
"C:/Intlfonts/European" "C:/Intlfonts/European.BIG"
"C:/Intlfonts/Japanese" "C:/Intlfonts/Japanese.X"
"C:/Intlfonts/Japanese.BIG" "C:/Intlfonts/Korean.X"
"C:/Intlfonts/Misc"))
Next, you need to set up the variable w32-bdf-filename-alist to
an alist of the BDF fonts and their corresponding file names.
Assuming you have set bdf-directory-list to name all the
directories with the BDF font files, the following Lisp snippet will
set up w32-bdf-filename-alist:
(setq w32-bdf-filename-alist
(w32-find-bdf-fonts bdf-directory-list))
Now, create fontsets for the BDF fonts:
(create-fontset-from-fontset-spec
"-*-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-c-*-fontset-bdf,
japanese-jisx0208:-*-*-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-c-*-jisx0208.1983-*,
katakana-jisx0201:-*-*-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-c-*-jisx0201*-*,
latin-jisx0201:-*-*-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-c-*-jisx0201*-*,
japanese-jisx0208-1978:-*-*-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-c-*-jisx0208.1978-*,
thai-tis620:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-m-80-tis620.2529-1,
lao:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-m-80-MuleLao-1,
tibetan-1-column:-TibMdXA-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-m-80-MuleTibetan-1,
ethiopic:-Admas-Ethiomx16f-Medium-R-Normal--16-150-100-100-M-160-Ethiopic-Unicode,
tibetan:-TibMdXA-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-m-160-MuleTibetan-0")
Many of the international bdf fonts from Intlfonts are type 0, and therefore need to be added to font-encoding-alist:
(setq font-encoding-alist
(append '(("MuleTibetan-0" (tibetan . 0))
("GB2312" (chinese-gb2312 . 0))
("JISX0208" (japanese-jisx0208 . 0))
("JISX0212" (japanese-jisx0212 . 0))
("VISCII" (vietnamese-viscii-lower . 0))
("KSC5601" (korean-ksc5601 . 0))
("MuleArabic-0" (arabic-digit . 0))
("MuleArabic-1" (arabic-1-column . 0))
("MuleArabic-2" (arabic-2-column . 0)))
font-encoding-alist))
You can now use the Emacs font menu to select the ‘bdf: 16-dot medium’ fontset, or you can select it by setting the default font in your ~/.emacs:
(set-default-font "fontset-bdf")
If you read mail with Rmail, set the variable mail-yank-prefix.
For Gnus, set message-yank-prefix. For VM, set
vm-included-text-prefix. For mh-e, set mh-ins-buf-prefix.
For fancier control of citations, use Supercite (see the Supercite Manual).
To prevent Emacs from including various headers of the replied-to
message, set the value of mail-yank-ignored-headers to an
appropriate regexp.
You can either mail yourself a copy by including a ‘BCC’ header in the mail message, or store a copy of the message directly to a file by including an ‘FCC’ header.
If you use standard mail, you can automatically create a ‘BCC’ to yourself by putting
(setq mail-self-blind t)
in your .emacs file. You can automatically include an ‘FCC’ field by putting something like the following in your .emacs file:
(setq mail-archive-file-name (expand-file-name "~/outgoing"))
The output file will be in Unix mail format.
If you use mh-e, add an ‘FCC’ or ‘BCC’ field to your
components file.
It does not work to put ‘set record filename’ in the .mailrc file.
See The Emacs Manual.
(add-hook 'mail-mode-hook 'mail-abbrevs-setup)
Note that the aliases are expanded automatically only after you type a word-separator character (e.g. <RET> or ,). You can force their expansion by moving point to the end of the alias and typing C-x a e (M-x expand-abbrev).
In Rmail, type C-c C-s C-h to get a list of sorting functions and their key bindings.
This is the behavior of the movemail program which Rmail uses.
This indicates that movemail is configured to use lock files.
RMS writes:
Certain systems require lock files to interlock access to mail files. On these systems,movemailmust write lock files, or you risk losing mail. You simply must arrange to letmovemailwrite them.Other systems use the
flocksystem call to interlock access. On these systems, you should configuremovemailto useflock.
Ron Isaacson says: When you hit <r> to reply in Rmail, by default it CCs all of the original recipients (everyone on the original ‘To’ and ‘CC’ lists). With a prefix argument (i.e., typing C-u before <r>), it replies only to the sender. However, going through the whole C-u business every time you want to reply is a pain. This is the best fix I've been able to come up with:
(defun rmail-reply-t ()
"Reply only to the sender of the current message. (See rmail-reply.)"
(interactive)
(rmail-reply t))
(add-hook 'rmail-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(define-key rmail-mode-map "r" 'rmail-reply-t)
(define-key rmail-mode-map "R" 'rmail-reply)))
emacs -f gnus
in Rmail:
emacs -f rmail
A more convenient way to start with Gnus:
alias gnus 'emacs -f gnus'
gnus
It is probably unwise to automatically start your mail or news reader from your .emacs file. This would cause problems if you needed to run two copies of Emacs at the same time. Also, this would make it difficult for you to start Emacs quickly when you needed to.
Use M-x gnus. For more information on Gnus, see the Gnus Manual, which includes the Gnus FAQ.
There is a bug in NNTP version 1.5.10, such that when multiple requests are sent to the NNTP server, the server only handles the first one before blocking waiting for more input which never comes. NNTP version 1.5.11 claims to fix this.
You can work around the bug inside Emacs like this:
(setq nntp-maximum-request 1)
You can find out what version of NNTP your news server is running by telnetting to the NNTP port (usually 119) on the news server machine (i.e., telnet server-machine 119). The server should give its version number in the welcome message. Type quit to get out.
From the Gnus FAQ (see Reading news with Emacs):
If you have a slow machine, or are just really impatient, there are a few things you can do to make Gnus run faster.Set
gnus-check-new-newsgroupsandgnus-check-bogus-newsgroupstonilto make startup faster.Set
gnus-show-threads,gnus-use-cross-referenceandgnus-nov-is-eviltonilto make entering and exiting the summary buffer faster.
In the *Newsgroup* buffer, type M-< C-x ( c y C-x ) M-0 C-x e
Leave off the initial M-< if you only want to catch up from point to the end of the *Newsgroup* buffer.
#ifdef, selective display of: Hiding #ifdef lines., equivalent to vi command: Repeating commandsxterm: Meta key does not work in xtermload-path: Changing load-pathgnu.emacs.help: Newsgroup archivesauto-fill-mode, activating automatically: Turning on auto-fill by defaultauto-fill-mode, introduction to: Wrapping words automaticallyauto-mode-alist, modifying: Associating modes with filesauto-fill-mode: Turning on auto-fill by defaultcase-fold-search: Controlling case sensitivitycase-replace: Controlling case sensitivityshell-mode: Shell mode loses the current directoryfont-lock-mode: Turning on syntax highlightingdefault-tab-width: Changing the length of a Tabdelete-selection-mode: Replacing highlighted textshell-mode: Shell mode loses the current directoryauto-save-mode: Disabling auto-save-modeetags: Documentation for etagsshell-mode: ^M in the shell bufferemacsclient: Using an already running Emacs processls output: Escape sequences in shell outputetags, documentation for: Documentation for etagsexplicit-shell-file-name: Problems with Shell Modefont-lock-mode: Turning on syntax highlightingfile-local-variable and security: Security risks with Emacsfill-column, default value: Wrapping words automaticallyfont-lock-mode: Turning on syntax highlightingframe-title-format: Displaying the current file name in the titlebargnuserv: Using an already running Emacs processhide-ifdef-mode: Hiding #ifdef lines#ifdef text: Hiding #ifdef lineshscroll-mode: Horizontal scrollingswitch: Indenting switch statementskeyboard-translate: Swapping keysline-number-mode: Displaying the current line or columnload-path, modifying: Changing load-pathls in Shell mode: Escape sequences in shell outputmail-yank-prefix: Inserting text at the beginning of each linemode-line-format: Displaying the current line or columnload-path: Changing load-pathoverwrite-mode: Overwrite modepicture-mode: Forcing the cursor to remain in the same column#ifdef code: Hiding #ifdef linesvi emulators: Displaying the current line or columnshell-mode and current directory: Shell mode loses the current directoryvi: Matching parenthesesswitch, indenting: Indenting switch statementsoverwrite-mode: Overwrite modetransient-mark-mode: Highlighting a regionw3-mode: Emacs/W3w32-bdf-filename-alist: How to add fontsw32-find-bdf-fonts: How to add fonts