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Date:Mon Sep 3 10:48:34 1993 
Subject:Re: FAQ? Can I use emacs instead of ved. 
From:cjp (Chris Price) 
Volume-ID:930903.04 

Robin P writes:
>Anthony Heading asks if he can use emacs instead of ved... The answer
>is a little complicated.
>
>(A) There -are- emacs emulators available for ved. Try help emacs,
>help vedemacs. Since some use of VED is almost unavoidable, it is worth
>compiling one of these in your init.p or vedinit.p file, so that you have
>familiar cursor key bindings. 

Avoid it altogether. You might occasionally want to type a command to a pop
prompt, but don't use VED. The reason my answer is different to Robin's
seems to be because Richard Caley's pop-mode for emacs accesses help files
(see below).

>Having become used to emacs on a trip to the
>US in 1981, I find this minimal emulation quite adequate, but of course you
>can't write emacs-lisp for it, and the command line processing is not the
>same. (emacs' handling of commands is in my opinion superior to ved's, but
>the difference is not so marked as to make me particularly unhappy.).

If you are an emacs junkie you will think VED-EMACS stinks. Sorry Aaron, I
know you did your best, but emacs isn't an editor, it's a lifestyle.

>(B) There are sundry chunks of emacs lisp code to allow POPLOG to be run from
>gnu emacs. Probably the most complete of these is that written by Gordon
>Dakin of the University of Massachusetts, (dakin@cs.umass.edu). I believe that
>this is in contrib by now - I can't check 'cos I didnt load contrib when I
>installed this Poplog here. Gordon uses this code on a daily basis. There is
>also a more limited interface by (I believe) Mr Caley.
>
>Poplog differs from other systems that emacs has to deal with in that it
>speaks several languages, and Gordon's code takes account of that. It
>includes, or includes references to, other chunks of emacs-lisp code for
>dealing with all the Poplog languages.
>
>However, there is I believe no emacs interface to the online documentation
>of Poplog - you can of course read the files if you can find them, and even
>executed chunks of code.

Richard Caley's interface does interface to the documentation, although
only giving you one window of each type (ref, doc, hep etc). This can be a
little annoying. You also need to tweak the editor mode for the help buffer
if you want to compile the code in a help file. To set it up to access all
help files (local, X, etc) you need to change some lists in pop-mode.el.

I have a changed version of the Caley code to make it look much more like
ada-mode or pascal-mode: allowing you to C-c C-d to get a procedure
template for example. Can be helpful if you are writing lots of new code.

Cheers,

Chris
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Price, Department of Computer Science, University of Wales,
             Aberystwyth, Dyfed, SY23 3DB, United Kingdom.
email: cjp@uk.ac.aber (within UK) cjp@aber.ac.uk (rest of world)
Telephone: 0970-622444
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