Frequently asked questions about XEmacs

This is the guide to the XEmacs Frequently Asked Questions list--a compendium of questions and answers pertaining to one of the finest programs ever written. XEmacs is much more than just a Text Editor.

This FAQ is freely redistributable. This FAQ is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

If you have a Web browser, the official hypertext version is at http://www.xemacs.org/FAQ/xemacs-faq.html

1 Introduction, Policy, Credits

Learning XEmacs is a lifelong activity. Even people who have used Emacs for years keep discovering new features. Therefore this document cannot be complete. Instead it is aimed at the person who is either considering XEmacs for their own use, or has just obtained it and is wondering what to do next. It is also useful as a reference to available resources.

The previous maintainer of the FAQ was Anthony Rossini, who started it, after getting tired of hearing JWZ complain about repeatedly having to answer questions. Ben Wing then took over and did a massive update reorganizing the whole thing. At this point Anthony took back over, but then had to give it up again. Some of the other contributors to this FAQ are listed later in this document.

The previous version was converted to hypertext format, and edited by Steven L. Baur. It was converted back to texinfo by Hrvoje Niksic. The FAQ was then maintained by Andreas Kaempf, who passed it on to ChristianNybø, and then to Sandra Wambold.

The current version of the FAQ has been heavily redone by Ben Wing.

If you notice any errors or items which should be added or amended to this FAQ please send email to xemacs-beta@xemacs.org. Include `XEmacs FAQ' on the Subject: line.

1.0: What is XEmacs?

Q1.0.1: What is XEmacs?

XEmacs is a powerful, highly customizable open source text editor and application development system, with full GUI support. It is protected under the GNU Public License and related to other versions of Emacs, in particular GNU Emacs. Its emphasis is on modern graphical user interface support and an open software development model, similar to Linux. XEmacs has an active development community numbering in the hundreds (and thousands of active beta testers on top of this), and runs on all versions of MS Windows, on Mac OS X, on Linux, and on nearly every other version of Unix in existence. Support for XEmacs has been supplied by Sun Microsystems, University of Illinois, Lucid, ETL/Electrotechnical Laboratory, Amdahl Corporation, BeOpen, and others, as well as the unpaid time of a great number of individual developers.

Q1.0.2: What is the current version of XEmacs?

XEmacs versions 21.4.* are releases made from the current stable sources. XEmacs versions 21.5.* (which will be released as 22.0) are releases made from the development sources. Check at http://www.xemacs.org for the current minor version. XEmacs versions 21.1.* were the previous stable releases, now retired.

XEmacs 20.4, released in February 1998, was the last release of v20.

XEmacs 19.16, released in November, 1997. was the last release of v19, and was also the last version without international language support.

Q1.0.3: How do you pronounce XEmacs?

The most common pronounciation is `Eks eemax'.

Q1.0.4: What does XEmacs look like?

Screen snapshots are available at http://www.xemacs.org/About/Screenshots/index.html as part of the XEmacs website.

Q1.0.5: Who wrote XEmacs?

XEmacs is the result of the time and effort of many people, and the active developers have changed over time. There are two major components of the XEmacs effort -- writing the code itself and providing all the support work (testing the code, releasing beta and final versions, handling patches, reading bug reports, maintaining the web site, managing the mailing lists, etc. etc.). Neither component would work without the other.

CODING

The primary code contributor over the years has been Ben Wing (active since late 1992). Between 1991 and 1995, large amounts of coding was contributed by Jamie Zawinski and Chuck Thompson. Many other people have authored major subsystems or otherwise contributed large amounts of code, including Andy Piper, Hrvoje Niksic, Jerry James, Jonathan Harris, Kyle Jones, Martin Buchholz, Michael Sperber, Olivier Galibert, Richard Mlynarik, Stig, William Perry and plenty of others.

Primary XEmacs-specific subsystems and their authors:

Objects

• Conversion from 26-bit to 28-bit pointers and integers, lrecords, lcrecords: Richard Mlynarik, 1994
• Conversion to 32-bit pointers and 31-bit integers: Kyle Jones, Martin Buchholz
• Portable dumper, object descriptions: Olivier Galibert
• KKCC (new garbage collector), ephemerons, weak boxes: Michael Sperber and students
• Random object work (object equal and hash methods, weak lists, lcrecord lists, bit vectors, dynarr, blocktype, opaque, string resizing): Ben Wing
• Profiling: Ben Wing
• Some byte-compilation and hash-table improvements: Martin Buchholz
• Bignum: Jerry James

Internationalization/Mule

• mostly Ben Wing; many ideas for future work, Stephen Turnbull

I/O

• Basic event/event-stream implementation: Jamie Zawinski
• Most event work since 1994: Ben Wing
• Asynchronous stuff (async timeouts, signals, quit-checking): Ben Wing
• Process method abstraction, Windows process work: Kirill Katsnelson
• Misc-user events, async timeouts, most quit-checking and signal code, most other work since 1994: Ben Wing
• Lstreams: Ben Wing

Display

• Redisplay mechanism: implementation, Chuck Thompson; additional work, lots of people
• Glyphs: mostly Ben Wing
• Specifiers: Ben Wing
• Extents: initial implementation, someone at Lucid; rewrite, 1994, Ben Wing
• Widgets: Andy Piper
• JPEG/PNG/TIFF image converters: Ben Wing, William Perry, Jareth Hein, others (see comment in `glyphs-eimage.c')
• Menus: Jamie Zawinski, someone at Lucid (Lucid menus)
• Scrollbars: Chuck Thompson, ??? (Lucid scrollbar)
• Multi-device/device-independence work (console/device/etc methods): Ben Wing, prototype by chuck thompson
• Faces: first implementation, Jamie Zawinski; second, chuck; third, Ben Wing
• Fonts/colors: first implementation, Jamie Zawinski; further work, Ben Wing
• Toolbars: implementation, chuck, much interface work, Ben Wing
• Gutters, tabs: andy piper

Device subsystems

• X Windows: Jamie Zawinksi, Ben Wing, others
• GTK: William Perry, Malcolm Purvis
• MS Windows: initial implementation, Jonathan Harris; some more work, Andy Piper, Ben Wing
• TTY: Chuck Thompson, Ben Wing
• Cygwin: Andy Piper

Misc

• Configure: initial porting from fsf, Chuck Thompson; conversion to autoconf 2, much rewriting, Martin Buchholz
• Most initialization-related code: Ben Wing
• Internals manual, much of Lisp manual: Ben Wing
• FSF synching: initial sync with FSF 19, Richard Mlynarik, further work, Ben Wing

SUPPORT

Currently, support duties are handled by many different people.

Release managers have been

• Stephen Turnbull (April 2001 - January 2003, March 2004 - present, 21.2.47 - 21.4.12, 21.5.2 - 21.5.7, 21.5.17 - present)
• Vin Shelton (May 2003 - present, 21.4.13 - present)
• Steve Youngs (July 2002 - September 2003, 21.5.8 - 21.5.16)
• Martin Buchholz (December 1998, November 1999 - May 2001, 21.2.7 - 21.2.8, 21.2.21 - 21.2.46, 21.5.0 - 21.5.1)
• Steve Baur (early 1997 - December 1998, February 1999 - November 1999, 19.15 - 21.2.5, 21.2.9 - 21.2.20)
• Andy Piper (December 1998, 21.2.6)
• Chuck Thompson (June 1994 - September 1996, 19.11 - 19.14)
• Jamie Zawinski (April 1991 - June 1994, 19.0 - 19.10)

The recent overlapping dates are intentional, since two or three trees are maintained simultaneously at any point.

Other major support work:

• Adrian Aichner wrote and maintains the web site.
• Stephen Turnbull has produced many of the beta and semi-stable releases and has attempted to be the "face" of XEmacs on the newsgroups and mailing lists.
• Steve Youngs currently produces the beta releases (???).
• Steve Youngs, Ville Skytta, and now Norbert Koch have taken turns maintaining the packages.
• Vin Shelton maintains the stable releases.
• Testing - #### Norbert, Adrian, ???

Portraits and email of some of the major developers:

• Andy Piper
  
  

• Ben Wing
  
  

• Chuck Thompson
  
  

• Hrvoje Niksic

  
  
  

• Jamie Zawinski
  
  

• Martin Buchholz
  
  

• Richard Mlynarik
  
  

• Stephen Turnbull

• Steve Baur
  
  

Many other people have contributed to XEmacs; this is partially enumerated in the `About XEmacs' option in the Help menu.

Q1.0.6: Who wrote the FAQ?

The current version of this FAQ was created by Ben Wing.

Previous contributors to the FAQ include

• SL Baur

• Hrvoje Niksic

• Curtis.N.Bingham

• Georges Brun-Cottan

• Richard Caley

• Richard Cognot

• Mark Daku

• William G. Dubuque

• Eric Eide

• Alain Fauconnet

• Chris Flatters

• Evelyn Ginsparg

• Marty Hall

• Darrell Kindred

• David Moore

• Arup Mukherjee

• Juergen Nickelsen

• Kevin R. Powell

• Justin Sheehy

• Stig

• Aki Vehtari

1.1: Getting XEmacs

Q1.1.1: Where can I find XEmacs?

To download XEmacs, visit the XEmacs WWW page at http://www.xemacs.org/Download/. The most up-to-date list of distribution sites can always be found there. Try to pick a site that is networkologically close to you. If you know of other mirrors of the XEmacs archives, please send e-mail to mailto:webmaster@xemacs.org and we will list them here as well.

The canonical distribution point is ftp.xemacs.org, available either through HTTP (http://ftp.xemacs.org/) or anonymous FTP (ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/).

Q1.1.2: Are binaries available?

MS Windows binaries are available at http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32/ for the native versions of 21.4 and 21.1. Cygwin binaries are now available as part of the standard Cygwin installation process. XEmacs also comes pre-built as part of many Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and SuSE.

Otherwise, you will need to build XEmacs yourself or get your system administrator to do it. Generally, this is not a difficult process under Unix and Mac OS X, as XEmacs has been tested under all of the common Unix versions and under Mac OS X and comes with an extensive configure script that is able to automatically detect most aspects of the configuration of your particular system.

Q1.1.3: How do I get the bleeding-edge sources?

If you are interested in developing XEmacs, or getting the absolutely most recent, up-to-the-moment, bleeding-edge source code, you can directly access the master CVS source tree (read-only, of course, until you ask for and are granted permission to directly modify portions of the source tree) at cvs.xemacs.org. Directions on how to access the source tree are located at http://www.xemacs.org/Develop/cvsaccess.html.

Nightly CVS snapshots are available at http://www.dk.xemacs.org/Download/CVS-snapshots/.

Q1.1.4: Where can I obtain a printed copy of the XEmacs User's Manual?

Pre-printed manuals are not available. If you are familiar with TeX, you can generate your own manual from the XEmacs sources.

HTML and Postscript versions of XEmacs manuals are available from the XEmacs web site at http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/index.html.

1.2: Versions for Different Operating Systems

Q1.2.1: Do I need X11 to run XEmacs?

No. The name XEmacs is unfortunate in the sense that it is not an X Window System-only version of Emacs. XEmacs has full color support on a color-capable character terminal.

Q1.2.2: What versions of Unix does XEmacs run on?

XEmacs is regularly tested on Linux, Solaris, SunOS, HP/UX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS aka BSDI, Tru64 aka DEC/OSF, SCO5, and probably others. It should work on all versions of Unix created in the last 10 years or so, perhaps with a bit of work on more obscure platforms to correct bit-rot. It uses a sophisticated configuration system to auto-detect zillions of features that are implemented differently in different versions of Unix, so it will probably work on your vendor's version, possibly with a bit of tweaking, even if we've never heard of it.

For problems with particular machines and versions of Unix, see the `PROBLEMS' file.

Much effort has gone into making XEmacs work on as many different machines, configurations, and compilers as possible.

Much effort has gone into making XEmacs 64-bit clean.

Much effort has gone into removing system-specific code, and replacing such code with autodetection at configure time.

The XEmacs core should build "out of the box" on most Unix-like systems.

XEmacs 21.2 was tested and `make check' succeeded on these Unix configurations as of 2001-02-10:

alphaev56-dec-osf4.0e (both Compaq C and gcc)
i386-unknown-freebsd4.2
i386-unknown-netbsdelf1.5
i586-sco-sysv5uw7.0.1 (both SCO's cc and gcc)
i686-pc-linux-gnu
hppa2.0-hp-hpux10.20 (both HP's ANSI cc and gcc)
mips-sgi-irix6.5 (both MIPSpro cc and gcc)
rs6000-ibm-aix4.3.0.0 (both IBM's xlc and gcc)
sparc-sun-solaris2.6 (both Sun's Forte C and gcc)
sparc-sun-solaris2.7 (both Sun's Forte C and gcc)
sparc-sun-sunos4.1.4 (gcc)

Some systems have a dual mode 32-bit/64-bit compiler. On most of these, XEmacs requires the `--pdump' (in XEmacs 21.5, `--enable-pdump') configure option to build correctly with the 64-bit version of the compiler.

mips-sgi-irix6.5, CC="gcc -mabi=64"
mips-sgi-irix6.5, CC="cc -64"
rs6000-ibm-aix4.3.0.0, CC="cc -q64"

On most of these systems, XEmacs also builds with a C++ compiler, but not "out of the box". This feature is only for use by the maintainers.

XEmacs 21.2 is known not to work on any machines with m680x0 processors. Sorry, all you sun3 and Unix PC nostalgia buffs out there.

VMS has never been supported by XEmacs. In fact, all the old VMS code inherited from Emacs has been removed. Sorry, all you VMS fans out there.

Q1.2.3: Is there a port of XEmacs to Microsoft Windows?

Yes. Beginning with release 21.0, XEmacs has worked under MS Windows and is fully-featured and actively developed. A group of dedicated developers actively maintains and improves the Windows-specific portions of the code. Some of the core developers, in fact, use Windows as their only development environment, and some features, such as printing, actually work better on Windows than native Unix and Mac OS X. The mailing list at xemacs-winnt@xemacs.org is dedicated to that effort (please use the -request address to subscribe). (Despite its name, XEmacs actually works on all versions of Windows.)

The list name is misleading, as XEmacs supports and has been compiled on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP, and all newer versions of Windows. The MS Windows-specific code is based on Microsoft Win32 API, and will not work on MS Windows 3.x or on MS-DOS.

XEmacs also supports the Cygwin and MinGW development and runtime environments, where it also uses native Windows code for graphical features. In addition, under Cygwin it is possible to compile XEmacs to use an X server (and XFree86 is available as part of the standard Cygwin installation).

Q1.2.4: Can I build XEmacs on MS Windows with X support? Do I need to?

Yes, you can, but no you do not need to. In fact, we recommend that you use a native-GUI version unless you have a specific need for an X version.

Q1.2.5: What are Cygwin and MinGW, and do I need them to run XEmacs?

To answer the second part of the question: No, you, you don't need Cygwin or MinGW to build or to run XEmacs. But if you have them and want to use them, XEmacs supports these environments.

(One important reason to support Cygwin is that it lets the MS Windows developers test out their code in a Unix environment without actually having to have a Unix machine around. For this reason alone, Cygwin support is likely to remain supported for a long time in XEmacs. Same goes for the X support under Cygwin, for the same reasons. MinGW support, on the other hand, depends on volunteers to keep it up to date; but this is generally not hard.)

Cygwin is a set of tools providing Unix-like API on top of Win32. It makes it easy to port large Unix programs without significant changes to their source code. It is a development environment as well as a runtime environment.

When built with Cygwin, XEmacs supports all display types -- TTY, X & Win32 GUI, and can be built with support for all three simultaneously. If you build with Win32 GUI support then the Cygwin version uses the majority of the Windows-specific code, which is mostly related to display. If you want to build with X support you need X libraries (and an X server to display XEmacs on); see Q2.3.7: How do I compile with X support?. TTY and Win32 GUI require no additional libraries beyond what comes standard with Cygwin.

The advantages of the Cygwin version are that it integrates well with the Cygwin environment for existing Cygwin users; uses configure so building with different features is very easy; and actively supports X & TTY. Furthermore, the entire Cygwin environment and compiler are free, whereas Visual C++ costs money.

The disadvantage is that it requires the whole Cygwin environment, whereas the native port requires only a suitable MS Windows compiler. Also, it follows the Unix filesystem and process model very closely (some will undoubtedly view this as an advantage).

See http://www.cygwin.com/ for more information on Cygwin.

MinGW is a collection of header files and import libraries that allow one to use GCC under the Cygwin environment to compile and produce exactly the same native Win32 programs that you can using Visual C++. Programs compiled with MinGW make use of the standard Microsoft runtime library `MSVCRT.DLL', present on all Windows systems, and look, feel, and act like a standard Visual-C-produced application. (The only difference is the compiler.) This means that, unlike a standardly-compiled Cygwin application, no extra runtime support (e.g. Cygwin's `cygwin1.dll') is required. This, along with the fact that GCC is free (and works in a nice Unix-y way in a nice Unix-y environment, for those die-hard Unix hackers out there), is the main advantage of MinGW. It is also potentially faster than Cygwin because it has less overhead when calling Windows, but you lose the POSIX emulation layer, which makes Unix programs harder to port. (But this is irrelevant for XEmacs since it's already ported to Win32.)

See http://www.mingw.org/ for more information on MinGW.