[Mac OS X TeX] Trying to get something Alpha-ish in Mac OS X

[W.Northcott at unsw.edu.au]

Mark wrote:

>- My UNIX-using friends say that XEmacs (I've been playing with
>carbonized Emacs 21) has that kind of support.  I decide to try fink
>to get XEmacs.  "fink install xemacs" I say.  After several prompts
>to make dependency choices that I don't completely grok, I go through
>a long list of never being able to download
>xemacs-base-1.56-pkg.tar.gz from a bunch of different mirrors.

Emacs is the Godzilla of text editors, but it is major learning exercise.
If you have not used it before get a book.  The O'Reilly one 'Learning GNU 
Emacs' is excellent.  It really is worth the effort.  The Apple Project 
Builder cannot handle GNU autoconf packages, but emacs makes an excellent 
IDE for such things.

Secondly there is no point stuffing about with different versions.
The architecture dependent part of emacs is an execution environment for 
the Lisp programming language.  That is all it does.  All the actual 
useful functionality editing, mail, web browsing etc. comes from bundles 
of Lisp code which are architecture independent.  It makes almost no 
difference if you execute this code in a command line emacs, a basic emacs 
under X windows, Xemacs or one of the Carbonised Quartz emacs.  The only 
difference is the GUI or lack of it.  Since you are running OS X, get the 
new Carbonised Emacs 21.1.

If you look inside Emacs 21.1 package  Emacs/Contents/MacOS you will see 
the emacs engine and a number of directories including 'lisp' and 
'site-lisp'.  These contain the Lisp code.

If you go to the main GNUemacs web site, you will find links to huge 
repositories of Lisp code to add every function conceivable from Tex to 
Objective-C class browsers.  Once you get the idea, you use Lisp to write 
your own extensions.

Bill Northcott

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