Re: [NEWBIE] Questions

[Robert Pollard]

On Saturday, April 12, 2003, at 02:26 PM, Kai Großjohann wrote:

> Robert Pollard <rpollard@apple.com> writes:
>
>
> The two spaces after the "1." come from the fact that Emacs thinks
> it's a sentence-end period and hence it makes two spaces.  Emacs
> always assumes two spaces after a sentence, when you do M-q.

Are there variables that allow you to indicate what pattern an end of 
sentence should follow?  It seems this pattern isn't specific enough.  
If I indicate that a sentence usually isn't started with a number and a 
period on a new line then that should be enough to get it to do this 
only when it is a valid sentence, correct?

> > I much prefer a carriage return to indicate the end of the
> > paragraph.  As it stands, you have to have a blank line between
> > paragraphs to indicate the end of the paragraph.
>
> I don't understand this.  Emacs almost never uses carriage return
> (^M) in a buffer.  And even inside a paragraph, every line ends with
> a newline.
>
> There is longlines.el which can remove "superfluous" newlines
> (within paragraphs) when writing the file and it re-adds them when
> reading the file.

Using "carriage return" was word processor speak.  I actually didn't 
know what Emacs uses for end of line/paragraph when you hit the return 
key.  Since looking at paragraph-start and paragraph-separate I come to 
the conclusion that it is looking for a line feed "\f" for 
paragraph-separate and a carriage return and line feed "\n\f" for 
paragraph-start.  Is this correct?  If not what does \n and \f mean?


> > It appears there may be some kind of continuation pattern being used
> > for each variable.  I do understand basic regular expressions but I
> > don't fully understand these patterns.
>
> Continuation pattern?

The info docs said something about changing both variables if you 
change one.  I assumed this meant that both variable definitions 
together consisted of what makes up the end of a paragraph?  Is this 
not correct?

> [snip]
> > Why would these key equivalents not work?  This is my first time for
> > using Emacs in Cygwin but I thought the key equivalents would be the
> > same on all systems.
>
> I have no idea why they might fail.

To quote a poster who sent me the answer directly:
"This problem, with this particular key combination, is indeed
frequently asked about, but I don't know that it's addressed in any
FAQ.  Anyway: edit c:\cygwin\cygwin.bat, and add the line

        set CYGWIN=tty

before the call to `bash'."


Thank you very much for your time,

Robert Pollard