Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours
Hour 10: The Emacs Help System and Configuration System
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Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours |
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Hour 10: The Emacs Help System and Configuration System |
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The most important feature in Emacs 20 (seen from the point of view of a newcomer to Emacs) is the customization utility. Customization support makes it a hundred times easier to configure Emacs.
Customization in Emacs is done using a variant of the Lisp programming language, called elisp. Thus, to configure Emacs to beep instead of inserting a blank line when you click arrow down (next-line) on the last line of a buffer, you must insert the following line into your .emacs file:
(setq next-line-add-newlines nil)
There are many chances for a person unfamiliar with programming languages or unfamiliar with elisp to make a mistake when inserting the preceding code line. Such a mistake would cause the line to have no effect and, in most situations, the lines following it would also have no effect. An alternative for customizing the preceding code line is to offer the user (that's you) a semi-graphical user interface. This is exactly what the customize library does. In Figures 10.7 and 10.8 you can see the customization of the preceding variable using the customize library in XEmacs and in GNU Emacs.
Figure
10.7
Customization of next-line-add-newlines using
the customize library in XEmacs.
Figure
10.8
Customization of next-line-add-newlines using the customize library in
GNU Emacs.
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Note - As discussed in the Introduction to this book, XEmacs is more graphically oriented than GNU Emacs, which you can easily see in Figures 10.7 and 10.8. The rest of this hour uses figures from XEmacs, because they are much easier to interpret when you're only seeing them. You should have no problem if you use the GNU Emacs customize interface instead, because the command buttons highlight when the cursor moves over them, which indicates that they are, in fact, buttons. |
Customization using the customize library is done by using graphical elements such as check boxes (or something that resembles check buttons), text entries, pull-down menus, and so on. Each element is discussed in detail in the next section. The customize library contains about 2,500 options split over approximately 400 pages.
Figure 10.9 shows a customization buffer.
Figure
10.9
Part
of a customization buffer
for the group Editing Basics.
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Caution - The group shown in Figure 10.9 is very large, so I had to remove some of the options to include all details of the customization page. In general, the options that you see on your customization pages might be different from mine, especially if you use GNU Emacs. |
This buffer shows four options. Two of them are two-stated values, that is they might be either on or off. The other two are entries where the user can type a value. Each option part contains a header, which makes it easy to distinguish them from each other.
Apart from the header, the option section contains the following items:
A value field and a value description. This is the part with the toggle command button or the entry field. This is the actual configuration.
The state button and state description. See the following section.
A description of the option. If the description fills more than one line, the sequential lines are truncated. To show these lines, click the arrow at the end of the line. Likewise, the value part can be truncated. To do so, click the arrow next to the option title. (See the arrows in Figure 10.9.)
When you have configured what you want on a given page, it's time to set the variables, which makes Emacs behave as the options say. To do this, click either the Set button or the Save button at the top of the page. Set means set the variables for the current Emacs session, but do not save to the .emacs file, whereas Save means set the variable and save to the .emacs file. To leave the page, click the Done button.
Caution - When you click the Done button, the configuration page will be removed. No warnings are given if you have not saved the option on the given page. |
If you change your mind or want to get back to the state before you invoked customize, click the Reset button, which shows a pop-up menu with the following items:
Reset to current--This resets to the current settings of the page. This is equivalent to closing the page and reopening it.
Reset to saved--This resets to the values that are in the .emacs file. This is equivalent to closing Emacs and restarting it (if no other pages are unsaved).
Reset to standard settings--This sets the settings as they are, if no configuration of Emacs has been done. This is equivalent to removing your .emacs file and restarting Emacs.
If you have edited only one option, but you are not certain whether the other options are changed and you do not care to check, you can select the Set/Save/Reset functions from the State menu for the given option, instead of selecting the buttons from the top of the buffer. This will then affect only the current option.
Before you save a given option to the .emacs file, you might want to test it a bit first. You can do that by setting the option (that is, do not save it) and, when you have tested it, you can press M-x and type customize-customized. Emacs will then create a customization page for you, with the unsaved options.
The customize library offers customization of 2,400 options! The customization options have been split in almost 500 groups of options. Each group can contain subgroups or customization options.
The customization library contains only a few different widgets, which it does the actual customization with. These widgets and their meanings are described in the following sections.
The Toggle button, shown in Figure 10.10, has already been discussed in the previous section. It is used to select between two values, often on or off.
Figure
10.10
The
Toggle button
shown onscreen.
You have also already seen the Entry widget, in which you can insert text (see Figure 10.11). To use it, place the point in it, and press Enter. Then you are queried for the value in the minibuffer. Here you also have completion, for command names and variable, in case the entry requires one.
Figure
10.11
The
Entry widget shown onscreen.
The value menu is used when there is a small limited set of values available for the given option (see Figure 10.12). When you click the widget, a pull-down menu appears with the possible values.
Figure
10.12
The
Value menu widget shown onscreen.
The Multi widget is used when you are required to list a number of strings. The example shown in Figure 10.13 lists a number of modes for which Brace mode is enabled. To add an element, click the INS button on the line where you want a new entry. To delete an element, click the DEL button.
Note - The Multi widget can in fact also be used with some of the other widgets, not only the entry widget. This is, however, seldom seen. |
Figure
10.13
The
Multi widget shown
onscreen.
Faces in Emacs refers to a combination of font, color, and typeface attributes (that is underlining, italics, and bold). Figure 10.14 shows the configuration of Face. The column of check buttons is used to indicate whether the line they are in front of is to be regarded. Thus the widget in Figure 10.14 defines only the foreground color and the background color. The other values are taken from the default.
Figure
10.14
The
Face widget shown onscreen.
In the State menu, you can select an element called Show All Display Spec. If you do that, you can specify the face for the given option based on the characteristics of the display used. For example, is the display black-and-white or color? The Multi widget is used here to give you the opportunity to describe several display types. As indicated previously, the left column of check buttons indicates which elements to use. Thus, in Figure 10.15, the display is a grayscale X, but nothing is said about the background brightness.
Figure
10.15
The
Face widget, including display
characteristics.
Emacs offers a set of different entries to customize. All these are located in the menu bar, so there is no need to remember them unless you use them often. In GNU Emacs the commands are located as a submenu to the Help menu. In XEmacs, there is an item on the menu bar called Custom.
The entries to customize are as follows:
If you know exactly which variable you want to customize, you can use the function customize-option (or customize-variable, which means the same thing--you might find one name easier to remember than the other).
If it is a face you want to configure, you can use the command customize-face.
If you do not know the exact name of the variable or face, use the command customize-apropos, which finds all options, faces, and groups that match the pattern you're searching for. This is similar to command-apropos described in the beginning of this hour.
If you know the name of a group that you want to configure, you can proceed directly to this group with the command customize-group.
If you want to browse through the different options available, use the command customize or customize-browse. The difference between the two is that customize opens the topmost group for customization with an interface like what you've seen so far in this hour, whereas customize-browse opens a window that resembles a directory browser. The latter can be seen in Figure 10.16.
Figure
10.16
Buffer used for customize-browse.
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Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours |
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Hour 10: The Emacs Help System and Configuration System |
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