Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!husc6!bbn!gateway!PIZZA.BBN.COM!jr From: jr@PIZZA.BBN.COM (John Robinson) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: assorted questions Message-ID: <1423.590955666@pizza> Date: 22 Sep 88 18:21:06 GMT References:Sender: news@bbn.COM Reply-To: jr@bbn.com Organization: BBN news/mail gateway Lines: 71 > I figured this would not be hard to write > up in elisp, I would simply steal some code from list-buffers or > switch-to-buffer. Well grep on the .el files does not reveal a > definition for either one and I can only assume that they are in C?!? > Have I missed something? Or is there no way for me to get a list > of the available buffers in something that I can take the car of? Yes there are a lot of functions in C that are callable from lisp. In this case, the function you want is called (buffer-list), which is not documented in the way that ^Ha can find it for you, though ^Hf will tell you what it does. It also shows up if you say M-x apropos buffer. I tracked this down in about two minutes using the excellent emacs-tags function recently seen here. > 2) When you are at the bottom (top) of a buffer and execute scroll-up > (scroll-down), emacs responds with "End of buffer" ("Beginning of > buffer"). Wouldn't it make a bit more sense (at least from the > users point of view) to go to the bottom (top) of the file? This sounds wacky to me. scroll-{up,down} move the window. point moves as a side effect, since the semantics of windows require that point stay inside. If instead the window stays put but point moves anyway, that seems broken to me. Obviously the other style can be written as something like: (move-to-window-line 0) (next-line (window-height)) (if (not eobp) (recenter 0)) [warning - this is not tested] You may even be able to find something similar in one of the emulators for other editors (vip.el, edt.el, gosmacs.el) > 3) In overwrite mode, quoted-insert, inserts and does not overwrite. > Yes I know it is quoted-insert but that is still a bit odd. Ack! It is much nicer to be able to type ^Qx to insert an x than to leave over-write mode, type x, and then reenter overwrite mode. Overwriting with a quoted character is just ^Q ^D after all, still easier than toggling modes (and probably less common, at least for me). > 4) Is there some way to keep multiple marks? In other words, M-5 ^X^X > would swap my point with my 5th mark and M-5 C-space would set my 5th > mark etc. Look under ^H a register. Registers are the multipe marks you want. Of course, they can hold text as well as buffer positions, but that's just sugaring. :-) > 5) An emacs manual would be REALLY nice to have. You can order one from the Free Software Foundation for $15, and they are sold in some technical bookstores. All the information in the manual is available on-line in the Info (^Hi) command, and source for the manual is distributed with emacs. An emacs lisp manual (maybe what you really wanted) is in the works. I learn most of what I need to know by reading the source; that's a big part of the reason why the GNU license insists that it always be included. The emacs-tags function helps navigate the sources. > Thankyou, anytime. /jr jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr