Tag: Emacs

Unicode in Emacs

From what I can see, Emacs supports Unicode just fine. I had asked about it on the PLT discussion list, where it was explained that set-language-environment function will configure Emacs to use Unicode wherever possible. Here is the documentation:

(set-language-environment LANGUAGE-NAME)
Set up multi-lingual environment for using LANGUAGE-NAME. This sets the coding system priority and the default input method and sometimes other things. LANGUAGE-NAME should be a string which is the name of a language environment. For example, “Latin-1” specifies the character set for the major languages of Western Europe.

Here is how to get a list of valid LANGUAGE-NAMEs:

(sort (mapcar (lambda (linfo) (car linfo)) language-info-alist) 'string<)

(Execute the command C:u before evaluating it with xe to import the result into the buffer)
Here is how to set it to Unicode:

(set-language-environment "UTF-8")

Toggle between Vertical and Horizontal Windows Splitting

On gnu.emacs.help:

Requested: Function that toggles between vertical and horizontal split layout of currently defined windows preferrably preserving splitting ratio. 

(defun my-toggle-window-split ()
  "Vertical split shows more of each line, horizontal split shows
more lines. This code toggles between them. It only works for
frames with exactly two windows."
  (interactive)
  (if (= (count-windows) 2)
      (let* ((this-win-buffer (window-buffer))
             (next-win-buffer (window-buffer (next-window)))
             (this-win-edges (window-edges (selected-window)))
             (next-win-edges (window-edges (next-window)))
             (this-win-2nd (not (and (<= (car this-win-edges)
                                         (car next-win-edges))
                                     (<= (cadr this-win-edges)
                                         (cadr next-win-edges)))))
             (splitter
              (if (= (car this-win-edges)
                     (car (window-edges (next-window))))
                  'split-window-horizontally
                'split-window-vertically)))
        (delete-other-windows)
        (let ((first-win (selected-window)))
          (funcall splitter)
          (if this-win-2nd (other-window 1))
          (set-window-buffer (selected-window) this-win-buffer)
          (set-window-buffer (next-window) next-win-buffer)
          (select-window first-win)
          (if this-win-2nd (other-window 1))))))

Thanks Fabrice.

GNU Emacs on Cygwin

While it is possible to run Emacs on Windows, I suspect that Emacs “expects” to be running on UNIX. As such, I’ve decided to perform an experiment and try to do most of my work in Cygwin, including running Emacs. The following is how I did it:
Steps

  1. Create a Windows environment variable named ‘CYGWIN’ with the value ‘tty’
  2. Install Cygwin
  3. Install Cygwin/X
  4. Download-and-install Emacs using the setup.exe (as explained in the documentation linked above), choose the packages ’emacs’ and ’emacs-X11′, and be sure to check the “Bin?” checkbox. If you don’t check “Bin?” it will look like the installer is doing something, but in reality it does nothing (guess how I know that?).
  5. Add this to your .bashrc (see steps below if you want to use Emacs): export DISPLAY=:0.0
  6. Run: source .bashrc
  7. Run: XWin -multiwindow &
  8. Run: xeyes &
  9. Xeyes should pop up. Now try emacs
  10. Run: emacs &
  11. The Emacs welcome screen should appear.

Updating your .bashrc

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Type: emacs -nw .bashrc
  3. Emacs gives you a welcome message. Hit C-l to continue editing.
  4. Go to the bottom of the page
  5. Insert an empty line at the end and type in the text listed above
  6. Hit C-x C-s to save the file
  7. Hit C-x C-c to exit Emacs

References

Addendum: 16/10/08
I removed the unnecessarily complex step re-starting the shell when source’ing would have done just fine.
I wasn’t happy with my explanation for doing this, so I revised it.