File: emacs-19.34-bin.tgz
       Author: Richard Stallman et. al. (port by mdb@go2net.com)
      Release: 19.34 (1997-09-16)
Compatibility: DR9-PR
     Location: contrib/editors
  Description: GNU Emacs 19.34 (Editor, platform, religion)

This is a port of emacs 19.34, the extensible self-documenting editor, to
our favorite OS. It is largely untested (I use emacs mostly for editing,
heaven forbid, so I can't vouch for the operability of say, GNUs or rmail)
but it seems to work fine for everything that I do with it.

Feel free to report any bugs or strange behavior upon which you may happen
to mdb@go2net.com. I don't guarantee that I'll fix them but I do like
emacs an awful lot and would like to see it function as properly as
possible on the BeOS.

INSTALLATION
------------

If you are using Fred Fish's super keen GeekGadgets distribution, then you
can unpack emacs into it and it will fit in nicely:

% cd /boot/apps/GeekGadgets
% tar xzvf {download_dir}/emacs-19.34-bin.tgz

If you don't have GeekGadgets, you're still best off by creating a
/boot/apps/GeekGadgets directory and unpacking emacs in there. In that
case, you have to add the following lines to your /boot/home/.profile
file:

PATH=/boot/apps/GeekGadgets/bin:$PATH
export PATH

Even if you do have GeekGadgets installed, you'll need to tell emacs where
to find termcap file, this is done by adding the following lines to your
/boot/home/.profile:

TERMCAP=/boot/beos/etc/termcap
export TERMCAP

Otherwise, you can install it elsewhere but you need to set your
EMACSLOADPATH environment variable to indicate to emacs where to find
stuff and you need to modifiy bin/emacs to reflect the new installation
directory because it looks for some things when creating the dump file.
Consult the emacs documentation for more information on how to do this.

This port of emacs must be invoked via the emacs shell script that is
installed in {install_dir}/bin/emacs. This shell script tells emacs where
to find a special data file that allows it to load a preinitialized data
segment into memory and thereby bypass all that terribly boring
initialization procedure that made the last port of emacs so trying on the
patience. The first time the shell script is invoked, it creates the dump
file and then invokes emacs as usual. Subsequent invocations do not need
to recreate the dump file and therefore are much faster.

NOTES
-----

Subprocesses are somewhat flaky and I'm reluctant to debug them because I
never use them (good thing everyone has the source eh?). dired mode seems
to hang and compiling within emacs mostly works but then hangs at the end.
If anyone cares enough to figure out what the problem is, I'd be glad to
provide any knowledge I have of the emacs internals.

The windowing code is a hairy mess and I'm contemplating whether or not to
finish my XEmacs port and port the windowing code for that or bear down
and port the windowing code for GNU emacs and feel happy that I'm doing my
part to keep bloated software away from the BeBox (no comments about GNU
emacs already being bloated please). I'd be obliged to stop screwing
around with this porting stuff and go back to writing new software, but
font-lock mode is just so keen.

GPL OBLIGATIONS
---------------

The original source to emacs can be found at
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/GNU/emacs-19.34b.tar.gz

and the source for the BeOS port at
http://www.go2net.com/people/mdb/software/beos/emacs-19.34-src.tgz

so any of you enterprising hackers should feel free to rebuild emacs from
the source and improve on any and all aspects of this port.

Happy hacking,

Michael Bayne (mdb@go2net.com) 9/16/97