Re: Fwd: A few Emacs newbie questions, need oldbie answers :) (fwd)

[Kevin Rodgers]

Deboo wrote:
>    I'm using debian linux and the lisp files are in
>    /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp directory. Some files here are names
>    xxxx-el, some just xxxx, and some as xxxx.el, whereas some
>    others as xxxx.elc . I don't understand lisp or programming so I dont
>    know what is the difference, but could I move this directory to
>    my home directory and inform emacs somehow that this directory
>    is in my home dir?

The convention is that Emacs Lisp files are named .el and byte-compiled
Emacs Lisp files are named .elc.  Anything is in your site-lisp
directory is, well, unconventional.

You could move those files to your home directory with the mv or cp and
rm commands, and then inform Emacs like this:

(setq load-path (cons "~" load-path))

...

>    Well, I researched on this one a bit. I read the info docs and
>    saw emacs-goodies-el has a cycle-buffer-forward and
>    cycle-buffer-backward commands and we can bind these to M-N and
>    M-P in .emacs, according to the info, but when I do this and
>    start emacs, I get errors pointing me to these lines. When I
>    remove the macros, emacs starts okay. Can anything be done so
>    that these bindings work?

You would have to show us what you put in your .emacs file and exactly
what error was reported.

...

>    How would I put this in .emacs so emacs always has word-wrap on?
>    Would this be a nice thing to do?

Try this and see if you like it:

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)

...

>    I found another way to do it. Putting "-*- todoo -*-" on first
>    line ( or second line if the first contains #!/bin/sh), and then
>    opening any such file, would automatically put the file in that
>    mode. I tried using two modes instead of one but that didn't
>    have any success.

Each buffer is in exactly 1 major mode.  You can turn on additional
minor modes via the major mode's hook variable, e.g. the text-mode-hook
variable and the turn-on-auto-fill function above.

...

> Why does Emacs load all files in to the scratch buffer? If it's a file,
> and we've modified it, emacs asks us to save it before quitting but
> doesn't ask any such thing if we've typed in to the scratch buffer.
> How to autosave the scratch buffer? Sometimes I jot down something useful,
> in to the scratch buffer when there's no time to think of a filename etc.

"auto-save" means something specific in Emacs.  What you want to do is
to associate the *scratch* buffer with a file.  Since your .emacs file
is executed in the *scratch* buffer, try this:

(set-visited-file-name "~/.scratch")

...

> How to print from emacs, in color (with background, foreground and
>    syntax-highlight colors)?

M-x ps-print-buffer-with-faces (also available on the File menu bar,
under Postscript Print Buffer).

--
Kevin Rodgers