XEmacs Reference Manual







July 1994

(General Public License upgraded, January 1991)






Richard Stallman


Lucid, Inc.


and


Ben Wing

Copyright © 1985, 1986, 1988 Richard M. Stallman.

Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 Lucid, Inc.

Copyright © 1993, 1994 Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Copyright © 1995 Amdahl Corporation.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled “The GNU Manifesto”, “Distribution” and “GNU General Public License” are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the sections entitled “The GNU Manifesto”, “Distribution” and “GNU General Public License” may be included in a translation approved by the author instead of in the original English.


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GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

Version 1, February 1989

Copyright © 1989 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

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Preamble

The license agreements of most software companies try to keep users at the mercy of those companies. By contrast, our General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software—to make sure the software is free for all its users. The General Public License applies to the Free Software Foundation’s software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. You can use it for your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Specifically, the General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

For example, if you distribute copies of a such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must tell them their rights.

We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.

Also, for each author’s protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors’ reputations.

The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.

  1. This License Agreement applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The “Program”, below, refers to any such program or work, and a “work based on the Program” means either the Program or any work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications. Each licensee is addressed as “you”.
  2. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this General Public License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this General Public License along with the Program. You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy.
  3. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, and copy and distribute such modifications under the terms of Paragraph 1 above, provided that you also do the following:

    Mere aggregation of another independent work with the Program (or its derivative) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of these terms.

  4. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a portion or derivative of it, under Paragraph 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Paragraphs 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

    Source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable file, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains; but, as a special exception, it need not include source code for modules which are standard libraries that accompany the operating system on which the executable file runs, or for standard header files or definitions files that accompany that operating system.

  5. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, distribute or transfer the Program except as expressly provided under this General Public License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, distribute or transfer the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights to use the Program under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights to use copies, from you under this General Public License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
  6. By copying, distributing or modifying the Program (or any work based on the Program) you indicate your acceptance of this license to do so, and all its terms and conditions.
  7. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients’ exercise of the rights granted herein.
  8. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.

    Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of the license which applies to it and “any later version”, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the license, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

  9. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.
  10. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
  11. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

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Appendix: How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs

If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to humanity, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.

To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.

one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.
Copyright (C) 19yy  name of author

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option)
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.

If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:

Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19yy name of author
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.

The hypothetical commands ‘show w’ and ‘show c’ should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than ‘show w’ and ‘show c’; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items—whatever suits your program.

You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a “copyright disclaimer” for the program, if necessary. Here a sample; alter the names:

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the
program `Gnomovision' (a program to direct compilers to make passes
at assemblers) written by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice

That’s all there is to it!


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Distribution

XEmacs is free; this means that everyone is free to use it and free to redistribute it on a free basis. XEmacs is not in the public domain; it is copyrighted and there are restrictions on its distribution, but these restrictions are designed to permit everything that a good cooperating citizen would want to do. What is not allowed is to try to prevent others from further sharing any version of XEmacs that they might get from you. The precise conditions are found in the GNU General Public License that comes with XEmacs and also appears following this section.

The easiest way to get a copy of XEmacs is from someone else who has it. You need not ask for permission to do so, or tell any one else; just copy it.

If you have access to the Internet, you can get the latest version of XEmacs from the anonymous FTP server ‘ftp.cs.uiuc.edu’ in the directory ‘/pub/xemacs’. It can also be found at numerous other archive sites around the world; check the file ‘etc/DISTRIB’ in an XEmacs distribution for the latest known list.


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Getting Other Versions of Emacs

The Free Software Foundation’s version of Emacs (called FSF Emacs in this manual and often referred to as GNU Emacs) is available by anonymous FTP from ‘prep.ai.mit.edu’.

Win-Emacs, an older version of XEmacs that runs on Microsoft Windows and Windows NT, is available by anonymous FTP from ‘ftp.netcom.com’ in the directory ‘/pub/pe/pearl’, or from ‘ftp.cica.indiana.edu’ as the files ‘wemdemo*.zip’ in the directory ‘/pub/pc/win3/demo’.


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Introduction

You are reading about XEmacs, an incarnation of the advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time display editor Emacs. XEmacs provides many powerful display and user-interface capabilities not found in other Emacsen and is mostly upwardly compatible with GNU Emacs from the Free Software Foundation (referred to as FSF Emacs in this manual). XEmacs also comes standard with a great number of useful packages.

We say that XEmacs is a display editor because normally the text being edited is visible on the screen and is updated automatically as you type. @xref{Frame,Display}.

We call XEmacs a real-time editor because the display is updated very frequently, usually after each character or pair of characters you type. This minimizes the amount of information you must keep in your head as you edit. @xref{Basic,Real-time,Basic Editing}.

We call XEmacs advanced because it provides facilities that go beyond simple insertion and deletion: filling of text; automatic indentation of programs; viewing two or more files at once; and dealing in terms of characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and pages, as well as expressions and comments in several different programming languages. It is much easier to type one command meaning “go to the end of the paragraph” than to find that spot with simple cursor keys.

Self-documenting means that at any time you can type a special character, Control-h, to find out what your options are. You can also use C-h to find out what a command does, or to find all the commands relevant to a topic. @xref{Help}.

Customizable means you can change the definitions of XEmacs commands. For example, if you use a programming language in which comments start with ‘<**’ and end with ‘**>’, you can tell the XEmacs comment manipulation commands to use those strings (@pxref{Comments}). Another sort of customization is rearrangement of the command set. For example, you can set up the four basic cursor motion commands (up, down, left and right) on keys in a diamond pattern on the keyboard if you prefer. @xref{Customization}.

Extensible means you can go beyond simple customization and write entirely new commands, programs in the Lisp language to be run by XEmacs’s own Lisp interpreter. XEmacs is an “on-line extensible” system: it is divided into many functions that call each other. You can redefine any function in the middle of an editing session and replace any part of XEmacs without making a separate copy of all of XEmacs. Most of the editing commands of XEmacs are written in Lisp; the few exceptions could have been written in Lisp but are written in C for efficiency. Only a programmer can write an extension to XEmacs, but anybody can use it afterward.


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Key (Character) Index


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Command and Function Index


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Variable Index


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Concept Index

Jump to:   D   G   L  
Index Entry  Section

D
Distribution Preamble

G
General Public License GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

L
license to copy XEmacs GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

Jump to:   D   G   L  

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Table of Contents


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Short Table of Contents


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