How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[me]

I'm curious what you do with emacs

and gNus

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Hadron Quark]

me@privacy.net writes:

> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>
> and gNus

I'd say everyone that posts in this ng ....

-- 

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Mark T.B. Carroll]

me@privacy.net writes:

> I'm curious what you do with emacs

I write software and edit configuration files. I also use greed as an
RGTP client to a distributed discussion board system.

> and gNus

News (from multiple servers) and e-mail, both online and offline through
the agent.

-- Mark

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[me]

Hadron Quark <hadronquark@gmail.com> wrote:

>me@privacy.net writes:
>
>> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>>
>> and gNus
>
>I'd say everyone that posts in this ng ....

Ok

Dumb question on my part but here goes

I sick of bloated and fat software from MS

If I learn emacs can it replace say 80 percent of the
stiff I use now?

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Hadron Quark]

me@privacy.net writes:

> Hadron Quark <hadronquark@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>me@privacy.net writes:
>>
>>> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>>>
>>> and gNus
>>
>>I'd say everyone that posts in this ng ....
>
> Ok
>
> Dumb question on my part but here goes
>
> I sick of bloated and fat software from MS
>
> If I learn emacs can it replace say 80 percent of the
> stiff I use now?

What size is your stiff?

I all seriousness, its a bit of a silly question. There are many things
that emacs has been extended to do : none of which are particularly
"GUI" and "Idiot proof" in the way that most MS apps are. What is it you
do? Then google up emacs and see if there are packages which can replace
the Windows SW you use. I have tried to use emacs as a C/C++ IDE and its
rubbish compared to the more modern GUI ones IMO : I do, however, use it
for news, email and chat. Anything thats basically text based
I use it for since all apps then share the same "look and feel" and
keyboard bindings for basic and not so basic editing. But there is a
cost : emacs is not, despite what some would have you believe, the
easiest editor/platform to come to terms with. But, and a big but, when
you get into it I doubt you will ever change to another editor.

Here: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SiteMap

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Mark T.B. Carroll]

me@privacy.net writes:

> Dumb question on my part but here goes
>
> I sick of bloated and fat software from MS
>
> If I learn emacs can it replace say 80 percent of the
> stiff I use now?

I'm planning to try out emacs' planner and wiki stuff and whatever.
There are emacs packages for many things, but many are poorly enough
documented that it really helps to be able to read Emacs Lisp so that
you can study the source code.

For word processing and spreadsheets and whatever, probably I could bend
emacs to those purposes, but frankly I use other free tools like LyX and
Gnumeric instead.

-- Mark

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Ted Zlatanov]

On  7 Jun 2006, me@privacy.net wrote:

> Dumb question on my part but here goes
>
> I sick of bloated and fat software from MS

You shouldn't pick Emacs or Gnus because you don't like Microsoft's
software.  Pick them if they do what you need.

> If I learn emacs can it replace say 80 percent of the stiff I use
> now?

It can probably do 99% of the things, but probably not in the way you
are used to, and perhaps not as well.

(speaking as an occasional Emacs and Gnus contributor)

I would encourage you to experiment.  Dedicate a week or two to just
trying out Emacs and Gnus, and see if they do things the way you like.
If not, look for something else (but make sure to ask before you give
up, so we know what features people want, and so we can tell you if
you missed something in the manuals).

You'll probably find Emacs and Gnus a little intimidating at first.
Look in the manuals, especially the beginner sections, and a lot of
things will make sense.  Gnus uses terminology ("buffer," "prefix,"
and so on) that can be hard to understand if you don't do that.

Ted

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Malte Spiess]

me@privacy.net writes:

> Hadron Quark <hadronquark@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>me@privacy.net writes:
>>
>>> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>>>
>>> and gNus
>>
>>I'd say everyone that posts in this ng ....
>
> Ok
>
> Dumb question on my part but here goes
>
> I sick of bloated and fat software from MS
>
> If I learn emacs can it replace say 80 percent of the
> stiff I use now?

I don't know what you use, but I guess that it can.

Basically I'd say that using Emacs is *way* more effort than the MS
stuff, but the reward is better, too.

Ask about particular software if you want to know more.

Malte

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Z Maze]

me@privacy.net writes:

> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>
> and gNus

While this probably isn't the right newsgroup for it...

My computing life is almost entirely under Linux.  At work I'm
fortunate enough to use a Red Hat derivative; at home I run KUbuntu, a
KDE-based Debian derivative.  Emacs has an incredible amount of power
and I've gotten it configured to do what I like; I've had a lot of
trouble getting other editors and environments (e.g. KDE's "advanced
text editor", Eclipse) to do the same sorts of things that I want.

In the modern world, Emacs is kind of a middle-weight process -- Eight
Megabytes And Constantly Swapping might have been an issue ten years
ago but now it's nothing on PC-class systems where gigabytes of memory
are approaching the norm.  I still find it too heavyweight for
command-line use, so I will use vi (or occasionally even ed) for
things like editing configuration files.  The flip side of this is
that, since desktop environments now typically make heavy use of
off-white colors and antialiased fonts, Emacs looks barren and jagged
against the rest of my desktop.

What do I use Emacs for?  General-purpose text editing, including
especially writing longer things in LaTeX and editing XML (XSLT, XML
Schema, XHTML, ...) files (yay nxml-mode).  Any coding happens pretty
exclusively inside Emacs (C, C++, Haskell, make, Python, ...).  And of
course all of my non-work email gets read inside Gnus.

My Gnus setup uses an IMAP mail-source fetched into an nnml backend
stored on an AFS networked filesystem.  I use spam-stat.el to sort out
spam from ham.  This combination of things makes starting up Gnus a
little slow.  I also have one nntp server that I read a couple of
newsgroups (including this one) off of.

Right now I have three Emacsen running on three different machines.
One of them is running Gnus.  This is a pretty normal daily state of
affairs for me.

  --dzm

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Robert D. Crawford]

me@privacy.net writes:

> I'm curious what you do with emacs

I use emacs as the only interface to my computer.  I am mostly blind and
use emacspeak to do everything that I need to do.  With this setup I:

surf the web using emacs-w3m

read news, email, and rss feeds with gnus

use all the text editor stuff for config files, lisp code, html, etc.

manipulate files using dired

use the shell for things I find easier to do there, such as output
manipulation via pipes

Listen to music on cd and streaming media from the net using a lisp
interface to cd-tool and mplayer

I don't even run a window manager.  I just start emacs from my .xsession
file.  I am not saying that this will work for everyone.  If you are
used to point-clicky interfaces you might not like emacs.  Manipulating
graphics files is, I believe, a no-go, but viewing them works.

If you use your computer a lot, learning emacs will probably be a big
productivity booster.  You just have to stick with it and make it around
the learning curve.  After that, most everything's gravy.

rdc

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[notbob]

On 2006-06-07, Robert D. Crawford <rdc1x@comcast.net> wrote:

> use all the text editor stuff for config files, lisp code, html, etc.
>
> manipulate files using dired

I don't use emacs for everything, but it's very good for some things.
It's a great file manager and editor.  I used to prefer jed as my
editor, but recently discovered emacs highlights .foorc files,
something jed doesn't.  OTOH, I don't like gnus over slrn.  I've been
told a million times it can be configured to do everything slrn can,
and more.  But, I'm not into spending 12.8% of my remaining lifetime
learning how.  And what's with xemacs?  I downloaded and discovered
all the usual apps I was expecting are now optional add ons requiring
more time scaling the curve to learn how.  Not now.  Maybe later.  

nb ...oh, btw.... yep, every day!

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Joe Fineman]

me@privacy.net writes:

> I'm curious what you do with emacs

All personal & business writing & recordkeeping.

> and gNus

Email & newsgroups.

Things I cannot yet do with Emacs:

1.  Deal with the Web.  I use w3m for one site that is all text, but
    it is rather clunky, and I have not yet found out how to access
    graphics with it.

2.  Edit Word .doc files.  I wish someone would reverse-engineer Word
    to the extent of making it possible to edit the files in Emacs
    without corrupting them.
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  It is tasteless to recommend one's own taste, but scarcely  :||
||:  honest to recommend any other.                              :||

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Bastien]

Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> writes:

> 1.  Deal with the Web.  I use w3m for one site that is all text, but
>     it is rather clunky, and I have not yet found out how to access
>     graphics with it.

Press `I' in w3m.

-- 
Bastien

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Johan Bockgård]

Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> writes:

> 1.  Deal with the Web.  I use w3m for one site that is all text, but
>     it is rather clunky, and I have not yet found out how to access
>     graphics with it.

The MS-Windows port of Emacs 21 doesn't support images.

-- 
Johan Bockgård

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Robert D. Crawford]

Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> writes:

> 1.  Deal with the Web.  I use w3m for one site that is all text, but
>     it is rather clunky, and I have not yet found out how to access
>     graphics with it.

Here, T will toggle all images in the buffer and t will toggle the image
under point.  You can also press return on the image at point to show
it.  the letter i was mentioned in another post, which will show the
image in an external viewer.

C-h m while in an emacs-w3m buffer will show you all the keybindings
that are active for the active mode.  

rdc

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[me]

Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> wrote:

>
>> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>
>All personal & business writing & recordkeeping.

Cool

Now is this plain eMacs?

Isn't there something called Xemacs as well?

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Kastrup]

bojohan+news@dd.chalmers.se (Johan Bockgård) writes:

> Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> writes:
>
>> 1.  Deal with the Web.  I use w3m for one site that is all text, but
>>     it is rather clunky, and I have not yet found out how to access
>>     graphics with it.
>
> The MS-Windows port of Emacs 21 doesn't support images.

Which is one of the reasons to use the CVS version (one can be gotten
from <URL:ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex>).  There are also other
good reasons, but on MS Windows, it is probably the most important
one.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Glyn Millington]

notbob <notbob@nothome.com> writes:

> I don't use emacs for everything, but it's very good for some things.
> It's a great file manager and editor.  I used to prefer jed as my
> editor, but recently discovered emacs highlights .foorc files,
> something jed doesn't.  OTOH, I don't like gnus over slrn.  I've been
> told a million times it can be configured to do everything slrn can,
> and more.  But, I'm not into spending 12.8% of my remaining lifetime
> learning how.  

Customising Gnus and/or (X)Emacs is addictive :-) Great sport for that
time of life when rock-climbing or sumo-wrestling are no longer an option
but you need to fight off senility by any available means ... 



> And what's with xemacs?  I downloaded and discovered all the usual apps
> I was expecting are now optional add ons requiring more time scaling
> the curve to learn how.  

Download the latest xemacs packages bundle and the mule bundle (multi-lingual
stuff) (both called sumo! the first is about 23MB) from 

 ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/packages/      or your friendly neighbourhood
 mirror


extract them in /usr/local/lib/xemacs and you should get two directories

xemacs-packages and mule-packages

XEmacs will find them when you restart.


Some packages like Dired will work out of the box.  Some you will have
to start up from your ~/.xemacs/init.el file, the XEmacs equivalent of
~/.emacs 

C-h i will get you into the info reader and you can usually find the code
for starting your desired package by reading the relevant entry.  There
is masses of good documentation.


You can keep your packages up to date with the package handling system -
that's another story, documented here

http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/packageGuide.html

This is no worse than getting slrn and jed to play is it? :-)


> Not now.  Maybe later.

Fair enough!

atb




Glyn

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Z Maze]

me@privacy.net writes:

> Now is this plain eMacs?
>
> Isn't there something called Xemacs as well?

"Same thing, but different."  If memory serves, XEmacs started life as
a branch from "normal" ("FSF" or "GNU") Emacs over frustration on
getting one of the older releases out.  It's historically had a little
better support for inlined images, proportional fonts, and the like,
at the cost of supporting those features differently from "normal"
Emacs when it's added them in as well.  XEmacs's other advantage is
that it comes with an add-on bundle of approximately every elisp
package out there; "normal" Emacs is much more conservative about what
can be included (due to likely-justified license paranoia: while people
complain about the Linux kernel being of dubious heritage, all code
distributed with Emacs has had copyright assigned to the FSF).

My current feel is that XEmacs doesn't offer a whole lot that's not in
Emacs, and my normal environment makes it a little easier to use
Emacs.  Gnus supports both fine, including adapting to whichever emacs
is currently being used.

  --dzm [hoping he used the correct terminology to refer to the emacsen]

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Eric Eide]

"me" == me  <me@privacy.net> writes:

	me> Now is this plain eMacs?
	me> Isn't there something called Xemacs as well?

Yes, although both are usually capitalized differently: Emacs and XEmacs.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Eide <eeide@cs.utah.edu>  .         University of Utah School of Computing
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~eeide/ . +1 (801) 585-5512 voice, +1 (801) 581-5843 FAX

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Kastrup]

David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> writes:

> me@privacy.net writes:
>
>> Now is this plain eMacs?
>>
>> Isn't there something called Xemacs as well?
>
> "Same thing, but different."  If memory serves, XEmacs started life
> as a branch from "normal" ("FSF" or "GNU") Emacs over frustration on
> getting one of the older releases out.  It's historically had a
> little better support for inlined images, proportional fonts, and
> the like,

Uh, "better support"?  It supported them, and Emacs didn't.

> at the cost of supporting those features differently from "normal"
> Emacs when it's added them in as well.

Part of the reason is that the XEmacs way for such features usually is
incomprehensible.

> XEmacs's other advantage is that it comes with an add-on bundle of
> approximately every elisp package out there; "normal" Emacs is much
> more conservative about what can be included (due to
> likely-justified license paranoia: while people complain about the
> Linux kernel being of dubious heritage, all code distributed with
> Emacs has had copyright assigned to the FSF).

No.  For example MULE is not copyrighted by the FSF, but licensed from
the copyright holder.  But most parts of Emacs are (c) FSF.

The main problem I find with XEmacs is that it is a travelling junk
yard which does not deliver on its promises.  It has pretty lousy
utf-8 (Emacs has been the loss leader with MULE, contrary to the
general trend in featuritis, but in contrast to the trends I imagine
perceiving with XEmacs, development did not cease after initial
success, and so XEmacs stayed behind), image interfaces that almost
nobody uses because it is too hard to figure out how (and indeed,
binary images will get garbled on load once you have used dired for
the first time), a graphical interface and icons that look gross
compared to today's standards, and often incomprehensible
documentation.  XEmacs may be fun to developers, but since the shere
scope of Emacsen means that you can be developer of probably 10% of
the code base at most and are mere user for the rest, this gives it
limited audience.

> My current feel is that XEmacs doesn't offer a whole lot that's not
> in Emacs,

Multi-tty support is probably the only thing I can think of right now.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[notbob]

On 2006-06-08, David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> wrote:

> Emacs when it's added them in as well.  XEmacs's other advantage is
> that it comes with an add-on bundle of approximately every elisp
> package out there;........

Well, it used to.  No longer.  Now all those packages must be added by
the user.  I recently downloaded and compiled xemacs only to discover
basic functions like calendar, gnus, and dired are not included.  

I found this disclaier:

" In order to reduce the size and increase the maintainability of
XEmacs, the majority of the Elisp that came with previous releases
have been unbundled."

http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/packageGuide.html

nb

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[David Kastrup]

notbob <notbob@nothome.com> writes:

> On 2006-06-08, David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> Emacs when it's added them in as well.  XEmacs's other advantage is
>> that it comes with an add-on bundle of approximately every elisp
>> package out there;........
>
> Well, it used to.  No longer.  Now all those packages must be added
> by the user.  I recently downloaded and compiled xemacs only to
> discover basic functions like calendar, gnus, and dired are not
> included.
>
> I found this disclaier:
>
> " In order to reduce the size and increase the maintainability of
> XEmacs, the majority of the Elisp that came with previous releases
> have been unbundled."

Well, but they do provide the "sumo tarballs".  In principle, this
should allow components of XEmacs be updated independently in a more
timely manner.  In practice, it seems to rather have the effect of
developers not being worried about components getting outdated
independently.

At least XEmacs manages quite more frequent releases and partial
updates than Emacs does, but with mixed quality.  Arguably the XEmacs
development and release process scales quite better to the number of
active developers.  Unfortunately, developers are a scarce resource
for both Emacsen.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Tim X]

me@privacy.net writes:

> Hadron Quark <hadronquark@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>me@privacy.net writes:
>>
>>> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>>>
>>> and gNus
>>
>>I'd say everyone that posts in this ng ....
>
> Ok
>
> Dumb question on my part but here goes
>
> I sick of bloated and fat software from MS
>
> If I learn emacs can it replace say 80 percent of the
> stiff I use now?

Without knowing what you do or what your needs are, its nearly
impossible to say for certain. However....

I have been using emacs almost exclusively for 99% of what I do for
the past 8 years. I was an analyst/programmer, moved into managing a
mid sized data centre and now do project management work (though I
still miss programming and plan to move back there). 

In these jobs, particularly the management and project work, I need to
interact with a lot of people on various platforms, produce lots of
documents in high quality formats, maintain web sites relating to
current projects and various other bits and pieces. 

While some of my emacs configuration took some time to get right, I
have no problem with people sending me MS word, Power Point and to a
limited extent XLS attachments, I produce PDF documents, edit wiki
pages, use latex and docbook etc all without ever leaving emacs at
all. I use modes like planner mode, muse, emacs wiki, nxml-mode, w3m
and w3 for web browsing and if necessary, can send urls to firefox to
render. I use emacs to produce presentations and slides for talks, a
simple emacs based spreadsheet and database, bbdb for my contacts,
calendar and appointment mode for tracking meetings etc and lots of
other bits I've either downloaded or written myself. 

So, my answer is more than likely you will be able to do the vast
majority of things you need to do through emacs - it may take some
time before you find all the right packages, get the configurations
just right and perhaps learn to do some simple elisp to assist in
linking it all together. 

I run my emacs under Linux, so I can't say how effective it is in
replacing all the standard windows apps, but under Linux it works well
for me - your milage may differ.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Tim X]

mark@ixod.org (Mark T.B. Carroll) writes:

> me@privacy.net writes:
>
>> Dumb question on my part but here goes
>>
>> I sick of bloated and fat software from MS
>>
>> If I learn emacs can it replace say 80 percent of the
>> stiff I use now?
>
> I'm planning to try out emacs' planner and wiki stuff and whatever.
> There are emacs packages for many things, but many are poorly enough
> documented that it really helps to be able to read Emacs Lisp so that
> you can study the source code.
>
> For word processing and spreadsheets and whatever, probably I could bend
> emacs to those purposes, but frankly I use other free tools like LyX and
> Gnumeric instead.

For documents, AucTex mode under emacs is really good. Its been many
years since I tried out LyX, but for anything LaTeX/TeX based, I don't
think you can beat AucTex.

There are at least 3 different emacs spreadsheet modes and they vary
in how good they are. However, unless you need really sophisticated
stuff, I've found them pretty good. It does really help to know elisp.
However, elisp is not as daunting as it may seem at first and doesn't
take long to learn (like lisp generally, it is easy to learn, but
takes a bit of effort to master).

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Tim X]

Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> writes:

> me@privacy.net writes:
>
>> I'm curious what you do with emacs
>
> All personal & business writing & recordkeeping.
>
>> and gNus
>
> Email & newsgroups.
>
> Things I cannot yet do with Emacs:
>
> 1.  Deal with the Web.  I use w3m for one site that is all text, but
>     it is rather clunky, and I have not yet found out how to access
>     graphics with it.
>

Yes, this is an area where emacs is not as good as I wish. I use a
combination of w3m and w3. However, you can use the browse-url package
so that when you click on links or open html files, it all happens in
firefox (or mozilla or gaeleaon or whatever). 

> 2.  Edit Word .doc files.  I wish someone would reverse-engineer Word
>     to the extent of making it possible to edit the files in Emacs
>     without corrupting them.

Yes, word can be a bit of an issue. I use wv to convert word files
into either text or html. However, I noticed on the gnu.emacs.sources
list the other day someone is working on an ODF (open document format)
for emacs - this is what open office uses. Ultimately, this could
allow you to create documents in emacs and then use open office to
convert them into word files. 

Personally, I tell people not to send me word documents and when they
do, I tell them they need to convert them into pdf or some other open
format if they want me to read them. Not always a popular thing to do,
but so far I've managed to get away with it.

> -- 
Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[rambam]

>> For word processing and spreadsheets and whatever, probably I could bend
>> emacs to those purposes, but frankly I use other free tools like LyX and
>> Gnumeric instead.
>
> For documents, AucTex mode under emacs is really good. Its been many
> years since I tried out LyX, but for anything LaTeX/TeX based, I don't
> think you can beat AucTex.

Auctex is really very good.

All my "word processing" ( such a quaint and old fashioned term, like
"post-modernism" or "safari suits" ) is done within emacs using auctex
mode.

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[me]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:

>I run my emacs under Linux, so I can't say how effective it is in
>replacing all the standard windows apps, but under Linux it works well
>for me - your milage may differ.
>
>Tim

Thanks Tim.... exactly the info I was wanting

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Joe Bush]

>I don't even run a window manager.  I just start emacs from my .xsession
>file.  I am not saying that this will work for everyone.  If you are
>used to point-clicky interfaces you might not like emacs.  Manipulating
>graphics files is, I believe, a no-go, but viewing them works.

Can you explain how this is done, or provide a link that describes the
steps?

Thanks!

Joe

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Tim X]

Joe Bush <bushj004@hawaii.rr.com> writes:

>>I don't even run a window manager.  I just start emacs from my .xsession
>>file.  I am not saying that this will work for everyone.  If you are
>>used to point-clicky interfaces you might not like emacs.  Manipulating
>>graphics files is, I believe, a no-go, but viewing them works.
>
> Can you explain how this is done, or provide a link that describes the
> steps?
>
> Thanks!
>

Speaking for Rob is not my intention, but if your asking how you can
run emacs instead of a window manager and then emacs, its pretty easy.
There are some variations between X setups according to what
distribution you are using, but essentially, the following is the
basic concept.

1. You have a display manager (e.g. xdm) running which provides the
   interface you use to login to X. 

2. As part of the standard login process, the system looks for an
   initiation file which starts up various applications for the user,
   including a window manager. It may also do other things, like set
   the background colour, mouse cursor, ssh key agent etc. This is
   usually handled by what are called Xsession scripts by convention.

3. Most Linux distros have their own scheme for this, but they all
   generally allow for a user specific .xsession script to override
   everything. No $HOME/.xsession, do the system default thing. 

4. Here is the key bit. The Users Xsession will exit once the scripts
   started by xdm exit. Normally what happens is that these xdm
   scripts call the system default or users xsession script and in
   those scripts the last thing called is the window manager. The
   window manager is usually called with an exec call, which will
   transfer execution of the script to the program called by exec
   (i.e. the window manager). So, when the window manager exits, the
   script exits and the uses X session exits.

To have no window manager and just emacs running, you can create your
own .xsession script and instead of doing an exec wm, you do an exec
emacs. In effect, emacs will be your window manager replacement and
when you exit emacs, your X session will exit. 

Is that as clear as mud?

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Robert D. Crawford]

Joe Bush <bushj004@hawaii.rr.com> writes:

>>I don't even run a window manager.  I just start emacs from my .xsession
>>file.  I am not saying that this will work for everyone.  If you are
>>used to point-clicky interfaces you might not like emacs.  Manipulating
>>graphics files is, I believe, a no-go, but viewing them works.
>
> Can you explain how this is done, or provide a link that describes the
> steps?

Really it's just as Tim said.  I log into the machine via a console.  I
don't run [xgk]dm.  After I log in I issue the command

startx

which starts x.  My .xsession file looks like this,:

/*  next line begins .xsession */

#!/bin/bash
# I am not sure that I need this anymore, as I don't
# use anything but emacs.  Take a look at the man page
# for xrdb to see what it is for.
xrdb ~/.Xdefaults

# I have remapped the capslock key to be a super key, and the 
# browser next and back buttons on my Thinkpad to perform emacs 
# functions
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

# I can see enough to tell that there is a sliver of the root 
# window that is not covered by emacs, therefore I set it to be
# black
xsetroot -solid black

# if you wanted to start a wm from here, in this case, fvwm, here 
# is how to do it.
#exec fvwm

# Instead, I run a script that starts emacs with emacspeak
exec emacspeak

/*  end .xsession file  */

Then, just as Tim said, when you exit emacs, you exit x, which will take
you back to the console or the x login manager.

rdc

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

Re: How many use eMacs and Gnus on daily basis?

[Joe Bush]

Thanks for the examples, guys.

I, too, use startx after a console log-in. I'll make the changes
recommended and see if I like it. Since I do most of my computing in
Emacs nowadays, it seems like a logical evolution.

One additional question: I know I can get a new email status for
/var/spool/ displayed (I've done that). Can the status be set to show
new email on a POP3 server?

Thanks again.

Joe