Mail Archives: djgpp-announce/2000/02/08/17:50:58
This is to announce that the DJGPP port of GNU Emacs version 20.5
is available from SimTel.NET mirrors worldwide:
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/emacs.README
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/em2005*.zip
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/lei2005*.zip
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/ifonts12.zip
Please download and read the file emacs.README *before* you download
and install the rest of the files. Without emacs.README, it is very
hard to figure out which parts of the (extremely large) package do
you need.
Please direct any further discussions about this port to
comp.os.msdos.djgpp news group (or write to its e-mail gateway
djgpp AT delorie DOT com).
The first part of the contents of emacs.README follows:
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Emacs is an extremely powerful, extensible, customizable editor. It
serves as a programmer's editor, a programming environment, and much
more. Some say it's an operating system in disguise. Others say it's
a way of life...
Apart of usual features you'd expect to find in an editor, Emacs
offers many advanced editing features, and also many features that
most editors usually don't have at all.
Here are some of the advanced editing features that you should try
(the names of relevant commands and optional packages are in
parentheses):
- support for every imaginable programming language on Earth (Ada,
Assembly, Awk, C, C++, Java, Perl, Fortran, Pascal, Prolog, Simula,
Scheme, SQL, Tcl, VHDL, Texinfo, TeX, Nroff, SGML/HTML)
- compilation from within the editor (`M-x compile')
- invoking Grep and Diff from within the editor (M-x grep, M-x diff)
- user-extensible syntax highlighting (font-lock)
- automatic highlighting of matching parentheses (paren)
- finding function/macro definitions (M-.)
- reading Info docs (info) and man pages (man)
- interface to version control software (RCS, CVS) (vc)
- automatic expansion of partially-typed words (by pressing M-/)
- passing part of a buffer to an external program, and inserting its
output into the buffer (M-|, M-!)
- saving and restoring of Emacs state between sessions (desktop)
- color-enhanced comparison of files and directories (ediff)
- you can use Emacs as a word processor (enriched)
- you can use Emacs as a hex editor of binary files (hexl)
- integrated spell-checking (ispell)
- printing (`M-x lpr-buffer' and `M-x ps-print-buffer')
- built-in sorting of files, buffers, or parts thereof (sort)
- emulation of other editors (EDT, TPU, vi, Brief, even WordStar)
Here are some of the features you probably won't expect to find in an
editor:
- editing compressed archives--zip, zoo, lzh, tar, etc.--(arc-mode)
- ``editing'' a directory: use Emacs as a file manager (dired)
- display of calendar (calendar) and holydays (holyday), and
management of appointment diary (diary)
- computation of lunar phases (lunar) and sunrise/sunset (solar)
- packages for reading email (RMAIL) and news groups (Gnus)
- games (tetris, gomoku, life, solitaire)
- invoking arbitrary commands at certain time: you can use Emacs as
your system manager or a cron daemon (midnight)
Emacs 20 has several significant improvements and enhancements as
compared to version 19; it is also significantly larger (run-time
memory footprint grows by about 1MB, the disk storage now needs about
10MB more space) and somewhat slower. (On the other hand, typical
desktop machines got much faster and memory-adbundant.)
Emacs can be compiled with DJGPP out of the box, and you are
encouraged to get the latest version from the GNU ftp sites and build
it by yourself. But if you don't have the time, necessary tools or
disk storage required to unpack the full source distribution and build
Emacs, you can get the pre-built binaries and only those parts of the
package that you need from the DJGPP sites.
The single most important new feature in Emacs 20 is support for
multilingual editing. You can now edit files in many different
languages, and type text in any supported language, even if your
version of the OS doesn't have a built-in support for that language.
You can mix several languages in the same buffer, read and write files
in many different encodings for non-ASCII characters, and print
non-ASCII text to a PostScript printer.
The DJGPP version of Emacs includes full support for all these
features. The only multilingual feature whose support is somewhat
limited is the display of non-ASCII characters. Emacs can directly
display a single non-ASCII character set--the one supported by the
installed DOS codepage. It can also display all single-byte character
sets, such as Latin-1, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and other ISO 8859
character sets; however, where these scripts don't have corresponding
glyphs in the current codepage, Emacs _simulates_ those glyphs with
ASCII strings. For example, the Latin letter ``c with cedilla'' is
displayed as "{,c}" if the codepage doesn't support that letter. This
looks somewhat awkward, but the text is still readable by a person who
knows the language. Characters from Far-Eastern scripts, such as
Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, can only be displayed when Emacs runs on
versions of DOS/Windows localized for those countries. For more
details, see the section "MS-DOS and MULE" in the on-line manual.
Another significant new feature is Customize: an interactive package
for customizing every feature and option in Emacs without knowing any
of Emacs Lisp, the language used to extend and customize the editor.
There are lost and lots of other new features, too many to list here.
See the file NEWS in the distribution for a full list.
You will want to install this version instead of Emacs 19, if: (1) you
need the multilingual support, or some of the other major new
features; (2) you don't care about the slow-down of Emacs operation,
or have a fast machine with enough RAM where that slow-down and the
larger memory footprint aren't noticeable; or (3) you are an Emacs
addict and absolutely must have the latest and the greatest...
You will want to stick to Emacs 19 if: (1) you want non-ASCII files to
be displayed as literal bytes; (2) you have a slow and memory-starved
machine; or (3) you need the leanest, meanest Emacs possible.
The binaries here were produced from the official version 20.5 of GNU
Emacs, with the following changes:
* Built-in spelling works. You need to download and install the
DJGPP port of Ispell, v2gnu/ispNNNb.zip, to be able to take
advantage of this feature.
* Texinfo mode knows about the new commands (like @env) introduced
in the latest release 4.0 of the GNU Texinfo package.
* Arguments passed to subsidiary commands are quoted in accordance
to the quoting style supported by all DJGPP programs.
* A few Y2K-related problems in the Version Control support are
corrected. These corrections were lifted from Emacs 20.6
pretest distribution.
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