[PLUG] Emacs

[Galen Seitz]

> Anyway, this is an open call.  What can y'all tell me that'll help my
> transition?
> 
> I've got a book (O'Reilly's Learning GNU Emacs -- the gnu book).  I don't
> really have money for another.  I can look at the FSF's manual online, of
> course.
> 
> But building the thing is another story.  So, if you've got something to
> say, I'd like to hear it.
> 

I suspect this is ancient history at this point, but I can tell you that
it used to be quite interesting porting emacs to a new architecture.  During
the build process, a minimal version of emacs would be run after it had
been linked.  At that point, the core lisp code would get loaded into
memory.  This lisp code would be located in the data or bss section
(my memory is a bit fuzzy here).  Then emacs would play some very tricky
games by calling a function named 'unexec'.  This would alter the section
boundaries such that the just loaded lisp code would be merged into the 
text section.  Then the image was written to disk to create your new
emacs executable.

I did this for one of the original Tektronix NS32000 boxes.  I certainly
learned much from the exercise.

So much for the good old days.  With the current autoconf build process,
I doubt you will have much trouble at all.  After installing, you will
probably end up with directories like /usr/share/emacs, or 
/usr/local/share/emacs.  This is where all of the elisp code ends up.
site-lisp is a directory that holds site specific elisp.  It typically
holds elisp code that is acquired outside of the regular emacs build.

If you are just starting out with emacs, I'm certain there are plenty of
people here who can answer questions.

galen