Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac 1993 September/September 93.iso/Archives/Applications/Text/Text Editors/uEmacs_3.10/mac_dist_info

Text File | 1989-12-03 | 14.1 KB | 270 lines | [TEXT/Earl]

This is an alpha distribution of MicroEmacs 3.10 as ported to the
Macintosh Operating System.  It consists of the following files in
StuffIt archive format.

    mac_dist_info      This file
    emacs.tut          A copy of the MicroEmacs tutorial
    emacs              A Macintosh application
    emacs.rc           MicroEmacs startup file, place in System Folder
    readme             Dan Lawrence's notes on version 3.10
    emacs.hlp          MicroEmacs 3.10 help file

The "emacs" file implements the MicroEmacs program as a Macintosh
application.  It provides a terminal emulator in which the MicroEmacs
program displays its output, as well as some additional Macintosh
specific services discussed below.  Additional information not
available in this distribution may be obtained by writing to the author
of MicroEmacs, Dan Lawrence, at the address listed in the application's
"About" box.  I have mailed Dan copies of the source to the Macintosh
port, and I sincerely hope that he will be able to incorporate the
Macintosh sources into the next official version of MicroEmacs.  To
make full use of the program, it will be advantageous to obtain a copy
of the MicroEmacs manual.  This is a rather large document and explains
most everything there is to know about using MicroEmacs.  Requests to
Dan should probably be accompanied by a suitable donation.  Other
sources of MicroEmacs manuals and source code are various Internet ftp
sites and bulletin boards.  The program runs on a number of computer
lines, and information for it may therefore be found in areas devoted
to IBM PC, Atari, Amiga, etc.

It will be useless to send requests for information to me, as I return
this Mac II to Dartmouth tomorrow, I move to Seattle in two weeks, and I
begin my career as a Windows/DOS system programmer on Jan. 2, 1990.

The Macintosh version of MicroEmacs has several features which make it
different from versions for other systems, because of the nature of the
Macintosh User Interface and Operating System.  Let us discuss the
terminal emulator first, for lack of a better place to start.

MicroEmacs for the Macintosh has eight menus.  The three menus on the
right control the appearance of the text in the terminal emulator
window.  The font menu selects a window font from any of the installed
fonts in your system.  The size menu lets you choose from any of six
sizes of text, whether the chosen size exists in the selected font or
not.  If the size selection is missing a size that you want, then you
may install more sizes using a resource editor such as Apple's ResEdit.
Just add another menu item containing an ASCII representation of an
integer.  The options menu allows you to hide or show the scroll bar,
and to select or deselect bold font style.  If you select invisible
scroll bar, Courier 12, and plain style, then you have a window which
looks just like the A/UX Console Emulator.

MicroEmacs 3.10 has had its status messages translated into several
foreign languages.  Other versions allow the desired language to be
specified at compile time, and the status messages are taken from a
language specific header file.  The Macintosh version has all of the
available language specific header files loaded into it as resources.
If you would like to see all messages in Deutsch (German), then select
"Deutsch" from the Language menu.  If you are a Pig Roman, then select
"Igpay Atinlay" (Pig Latin) from the Language menu.  Dan Lawrence is
looking for volunteers to translate these messages into more languages.

The default settings for language and terminal options may be set by use
of pseudo environmental variables, contained in named 'STR ' resources
in the application file.  To change one of the defaults, open the
application with a resource editor and alter the named string as
follows:

    "LANGUAGE"      -- Name of desired 'LANG' resource.
    "FONT"          -- Name of desired font.  If this font is not
                       found, uses the System Font.
    "SIZE"          -- Text size.  An ASCII integer representation.
    "SCROLLY"       -- Width of scroll bar.  ASCII integer.
    "SCROLLYSHOW"   -- Whether to show the scroll bar initially.
                       First character is significant, if it is 'n'
                       or 'N' then scroll bar is hidden.  Anything
                       else means show it.
                       "Ja"    ->  show it.
                       "Nein"  ->  hide it.
    "PATH"          -- Place to look for "emacs.rc" startup file.
                       System folder is default.

Please do not distribute copies of this program which have the default
settings changed.

The MicroEmacs window allows you to display text in a proportional
font. Unfortunately, MicroEmacs expects its terminal to have lines
which hold a fixed maximum number of characters.  When a proportional
font is active, then the virtual terminal is sized according to the
width of the ASCII space (' ') character.  This means that some lines
may extend off the right end of the window without emacs knowing about
it, if they contain lots of characters wider than a space.  Program
behavior in this situation may differ from that described in the
tutorial.  The text may be still scrolled into view using the mouse.
Place the cursor over the text.  Press the mouse button, and drag
horizontally to the left.  The window contents should scroll to the
left, making the text visible.  The message line is always displayed in
a mono-spaced font.  The window font is used if it is mono-spaced,
Monaco is used if not.  Me, I like to edit Pascal programs using Symbol
18.

MicroEmacs 3.10 now has a mouse-modifier for keystrokes which it
understands.  Unfortunately, many of the mouse operations which are
possible on the Macintosh do not have matching functions in the mouse
interpreter built into the MicroEmacs kernel.  For this reason, some
mouse operations operate directly, and some are sent to MicroEmacs as
escape sequences, which may be redound by the more adventurous user.
Mousing in the MicroEmacs window is perhaps not in the same state which
will apply in the final version.  I will attempt to describe the
options which now exist.

The scroll bar works by default in the normal manner.  The buttons
scroll the active window up or down.  The thumb is used to go to a
vertical position within the window's buffer.  These are not presently
implemented as escape sequences, both for performance reasons and
because MicroEmacs does not yet have kernel code to mimic
TrackControl().  The two page regions map rather directly to the
MicroEmacs commands "next-page" and "previous-page," so I have assigned
escape sequences to them.  If you want to rebind "MSj" and "MSi," then
you will get different behavior from page-up and page-down regions in
the scroll bar control.

Mousing in the window grow area generates the escape sequence "MS1" and
sends MicroEmacs the desired x and y coordinates of the new window
size. MicroEmacs then requests the terminal to assume the new size.
Maximum coordinates are 254 by 254. Rebinding this function is not
desirable, but this information may be used to set the default window
size in your "emacs.rc" startup file.  Here is an example.

;
; Set the window size to 100 by 20 characters.
set $xpos 100
set $ypos 20
mouse-resize-screen

This may be done interactively by a sequence of "META-x" commands, but
would be considerably slower than using the mouse.  This sort of thing
may be handy to know when designing a startup file, however.

The MicroEmacs kernel currently understands two kinds of mouse commands,
presumably having to do with two mouse buttons.

"Mouse-move" commands allow one to move the text cursor and to drag the
window contents in a decidedly un-Macintosh manner.  Mode lines can be
moved also.  This mode is accessed using the mouse in conjunction with
the command key,

"Mouse-region" commands do things with the region.  These are accessed
using the shift key.  Shift drags define a region and copy it.  Shift
dragging a mode line deletes the associated window.  Shift clicking on
the insertion point causes a yank of the kill buffer to the insertion
point.  Shift dragging a mode line deletes its window.

Experiment with these two modes.  You may like them.  They both have the
problem that there is little interactive feedback to mouse actions while
the button is still down.

A third mode does not use MicroEmacs mouse escape sequences, but rather
operates directly upon the window contents.  This is actuated by
clicking the mouse with no modifier keys.  A simple click, either in
text or in a mode line, moves the insertion point into the window where
the click was made.  A double click in a mode line moves to that window
and then does a next-buffer command.  A double click in text sets the
mark at the click point, and moves the point to the previous mark.
This refers to mark 0.  Simple dragging defines a region, as in
shift-clicking but in a more interactive fashion.  Drags may extend off
the edge of the window, in which case more text is scrolled into view.
The region thus defined is not hilighted, because a region is
conceptually different from a Macintosh selection range.  Typing
anything will delete a selection range, while you need an explicit kill
command to delete a region, for example.  Mode lines may be dragged to
resize their windows.  If you drag a mode line up far enough, you
delete its window.  If there is only one window, dragging its mode line
creates another window for you.  Dragging the bottom mode line resizes
the bottom window, but does not move the mode line.

For your safety, clicking the mouse or attempting a MenuKey operation
aborts any message line or incremental-search activity which is
currently taking place.

The MicroEmacs keyboard interface is simple, and only does what key
translation is necessary for sanity.  The command key is mapped
directly to control, because I prefer to use the command key and
because Macintosh Plus users do not have a control key.  Menu key
equivalents are accessed by using command-shift instead of command.  To
cut something, hold down command and shift, then press enter.  The four
arrow keys are mapped to the MicroEmacs cursor movement commands, ^N,
^B, ^F, and ^P.  Command-arrow combinations are not mapped, and are not
bound, so you may map these to anything you like.  Enter is mapped to
^J, because that makes more sense to me than ^C.  Command-space is
mapped to NUL, because there is no way to generate a NUL on Apple
keyboards that I know of.  Command-6 is mapped to ^^ for the same
reason.

Beyond this, the Macintosh version of MicroEmacs does no key mapping of
its own.  If you have an Apple Extended Keyboard, then you have fifteen
^P keys, all in a row.  These keys, and the other special function
keys, should be remapped using a keyboard remapping utility such as
Macro Maker, Quick Keys, or AutoMac.

I have had numerous requests for a version of Macintosh MicroEmacs where
the option key serves as a META key.  Forget it.  The option key is for
generating Macintosh extended character set characters, including
diacritical marks such as those used in many non-English languages.

The MicroEmacs Buffer menu is used to select the working buffer, and to
show the status of all buffers.  Active buffers are in plain style or
italic.  If a buffer is in the modified state, then the buffer name is
italicized.  Inactive buffers are shown in outline style.  If you
activate MicroEmacs by double-clicking a bunch of documents, and not all
documents have been read in yet, then a number of entries in the buffer
menu will appear in outline style.  Select a buffer by choosing its name
from the buffer menu.

The Edit menu supports Cut, Copy and Paste.  You can Cut or Copy the
region.  You can paste any text in the clipboard at the point in the
current window.  Do not attempt to Cut or Copy very large areas of text
at a time.  MicroEmacs does its own memory management, and only leaves
64k over for use by system routines.  The maximum size of a Cut block of
text is probably about 32k.  MicroEmacs does not support Undo.

The Macintosh version of MicroEmacs supports a standard File Menu.  This
may be used to access files using Apple's Standard File package, which
should be familiar to all but the most novice Macintosh users.
MicroEmacs can also access files directly using find-file and related
commands.  The MicroEmacs built-in file commands all require that a file
name be given as a pathname or that the file reside in the default
directory.  The default directory is that folder holding the last file
in MicroEmacs' Finder argument list.

MicroEmacs keeps track of a file's location by pathname.  This version
of the Macintosh port does so, also.  This method has the chief
disadvantage that pathnames on the Macintosh can be ambiguous.  Don't
create problems for yourself by working with different volumes which
have the same name.  If you find this to be a restriction, then you are
welcome to get a copy of the MicroEmacs sources and rework all the file
handling routines to use Macintosh directory IDs.

This copy of MicroEmacs uses the _UprString system call to build a set
of case translation tables, instead of using the woefully inadequate
ctype.h.  For this reason case-change operations and word operations
should work properly in all single byte character sets.  In practice,
however, _UprString seems to have problems in all the System versions I
have tried.  Specifically, it does not seem to recognize that 'ß' is a
letter, even with the Deutsch version of 6.0.3 that I use.  Dan
Lawrence's "readme" file describes how to remedy this problem by
overriding the case translation tables.

Try it out by jumping über the word über in this sentence using M-f or
M-b.  Or, for the more adventurous, position just before the following
nonsense word, and try M-u!

    éñøüäöœ

Any problems with the way the Macintosh system interprets the case or
alphabetic status of a character may be resolved by over-riding the case
translation tables as described in Dan's "readme" file.

Now, let's try to fix the problem with ß, so that we can capitalize
"Straßburg."  Copy the following line to a buffer, and execute the
buffer.

nop &slo "ß" "ß"

Once you have this done, go back and try to "case-word-capitalize"
Straßburg.  It should work properly this time!

Earle R. Horton
Sun. Dec. 3 1989