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Gnu Emacs: Emacs Lisp
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GNU Emacs may be the most significant result of research in AI to date :). If you have ever been accused of being a geek, then you will probably learn to love GNU Emacs. Emacs is to `text editor' as the PPG building is to a mud hut. It has an enormous diskspace footprint, and is capable of doing just about anything, including reading the WWW, sending email, managing your email, transparent FTP (/host:filename or /user@host:filename), archie, file/directory management, running (La)TeX, managing CVS repositories (CVS), running interactive shells (M-x shell), keeping databases, acting like an arbitrary precision RPN calculator with graphics capabilies, spell-checking (M-$ for word check, M-x ispell-buffer for buffer check, etc), reading netnews, running a compiler and moving you to error points in your code, debugging C programs (M-x gdb), managing a calendar and even editing text files. While editing programs in Lisp, C, Scheme, Ada, or other languages, it is capable of indenting and highlighting your code based on syntax so that errors may be easily detected before the compiler or interpreter chokes. In addition, its language ELISP (soon to be replaced with GUILE?) is a powerful standalone language like Common Lisp but specialized for scanning and analyzing text.
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![[image of the Head of a GNU]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/g/n/u/gnu-emacs/i/000.jpg)
Emacs Lisp is much more than an "extension language" for the GNU Emacs program. It is a full programming language in its own right. Because Emacs Lisp was designed to be used by an editor, it has developed unique features for scanning and parsing text, as well as for handling files, buffers, displays, subprocesses and more. Emacs Lisp is ... closely integrated with the Emacs editing facilities. As a result, editing commands are functions that can be conveniently be called from Lisp programs, and act as parameters for customization of regular Lisp variables.
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GNU Emacs is more than an editor; it's a programming environment, a communications package, and many other things. To provide such a broad range of functions, it offers a full version of the Lisp programming language -- something much more powerful than the little macro languages provided in other editors (including older versions of Emacs). GNU Emacs is a framework in which you can create whole new kinds of editors or just alter aspects of the many functions it already provides.
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Writing Emacs Lisp is not the only method of customizing GNU Emacs. Since version 20, GNU Emacs has included a "Customize" facility which allows users to set common customization variables through a graphical interface. "Customize" works by writing Emacs Lisp code for the user, and is limited to relatively simple customizations. Not every user needs the full degree of extensibility offered by Emacs; those that do can write their own Emacs Lisp code.
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If your SMTP host requires authentication (which most seem to do nowadays), and if you're using GNU Emacs 21 or older, you need to fetch some more up-to-date Elisp files. Simon Josefsson and Stephen Cranefield have made modifications to the Emacs smtpmail source to add support for SMTP authentication. You can find information on <a class="external" href="http://josefsson.org/emacs-rfc2554.html">Josefsson's Emacs RFC-2554</a> page. It basically boils down to downloading and enabling three different Emacs Lisp source files. Just grab them from Emacs CVS and place them into the same directory; then prepend their location to the beginning of your load-path. When their functionality is required, the new files will be used instead of the old ones.
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Emacs Lisp can ... be used as a scripting language, much like the Unix Bourne shell, Python, Perl, scsh, or GNU Guile. Just as with those languages, it may be called from the command line or via an executable file. Its editing functions, such as buffers and movement commands, complement the features of Lisp and work in batch mode.
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