Terminal Vs. Me

flick justiceflick justice
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
So.

At school on the PCs Emacs has all these great colours <yeah Canada!!> much like BBEdit. Now I'm at home and emacs is not so colourful.. how do I fix/change this.. also that top menu how do I use that? anyway to get the mouse to work with it or some crazy combination of keys to access that?

flick.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    Try going to the Terminal menu -> Window Settings -> Color and mess around with that. That will let you set a custom color and transparency to your terminal windows.



    EDIT: If you want the colors to stay, make sure you click the "Use Settings As Default" button once you've changed them.



    EDIT AGAIN: Oh! You meant Emacs... not referring to eMacs at the school! I see now. I'd say try hitting F10 to access the menu of options, and look around for something. I already found a bunch of stuff I hadn't known about before, such as games (Snake, Tetris, and other stuff!). There's a lot of stuff you can do with Emacs, I'm sure you can find it in the menus somewhere.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    Get fink. Get XEmacs.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    flick justiceflick justice Posts: 632member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by torifile

    Get fink. Get XEmacs.



    oh wisest trofile, where does one like myself obtain such software?

    and is it/they compatible with what I'm doing at school?

    flick.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    The PC's are either using ncurses, or, more likely XEmacs. That means you need an X11 program. . . So, uh, try using Apple's "X11." If it's ncurses you need, just download GLTerm. It has some other benefits too, especially if you are displaying a lot of stuff to stdout.



    But what I want to know is. . . why are you using Emacs? . .Ugh. . . puke. . . awful. We have GUI's these days. May as well use em.



    Get Project Builder. (It's free and on your DevTools CD if it's not already on your disk). compile in the local terminal. I've found this to be much quicker and better than ssh-ing.
  • Reply 5 of 10
    flick justiceflick justice Posts: 632member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Splinemodel

    The PC's are either using ncurses, or, more likely XEmacs. That means you need an X11 program. . . So, uh, try using Apple's "X11." If it's ncurses you need, just download GLTerm. It has some other benefits too, especially if you are displaying a lot of stuff to stdout.



    But what I want to know is. . . why are you using Emacs? . .Ugh. . . puke. . . awful. We have GUI's these days. May as well use em.



    Get Project Builder. (It's free and on your DevTools CD if it's not already on your disk). compile in the local terminal. I've found this to be much quicker and better than ssh-ing.



    yeah I'd love to use something with GUI, but I also appreciate using the grass roots approach till I'm more experienced. I'm not totally sure what the software we use is.. I think its really emacs.. well thats what you type to get the sucker running.. but I don't really know.. only my third week I'm going to check out project builder too so when it comes time to spread my wings I'll already know how to fly.. wow did I really just type that? sorry. where do I find X11? what is it?

    so many questions!

    flick.
  • Reply 6 of 10
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Flick Justice

    oh wisest trofile, where does one like myself obtain such software?

    and is it/they compatible with what I'm doing at school?

    flick.



    fink.sourceforge.net will have fink. It's a frontend to install many UNIX programs. Using fink and Apple's X11, you can use XEmacs, which gives you coloration of your syntax.



    I'm not sure what you mean by "compatible" with what you're doing at school because i don't know what that is but if it's emacs you're using there, I can't see why it wouldn't be.
  • Reply 7 of 10
    skipjackskipjack Posts: 263member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Flick Justice

    where do I find X11? what is it?





    Apple's X11 is still in Public Beta, but I've been using it since it came out. I don't use it directly, but a program called MATLAB uses it.



    This page describes X11 and provides a download link.
  • Reply 8 of 10
    thunderpoitthunderpoit Posts: 709member
    bah, none of that is necessary. all you need to do is



    setenv TERM xterm-color





    (edit: i cant remember the name of the file that stores settings for the terminal, i know its .trcsh or somthing like that, can anyone elaborate?)
  • Reply 9 of 10
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    actually, XEmacs isn't necessary. Emacs itself can open up its own window (out of the terminal) and will look/act just like XEmacs (xemacs, afterall, is just a hack). If you get X11 (and you don't have to go to apple to get it, theres a version called XDarwin which is also available. A few others too). Once you have that installed and opened, in a terminal you have to set your DISPLAY variable (setenv DISPLAY :0), then run emacs (note: the DISPLAY variable only survives for the length of that terminal. So when u open a new one its gone, unless you put it in your shell-startup script). Emacs will open a window just like any other x11 program. Alternatively, if you'd like to avoid the Terminal.app, x11 or xdarwin should open an xterm window when you start them, and from there you can just type 'emacs' to startup emacs in x11-mode. with an x11 window of emacs, all the menus and things can be controlled with the mouse.



    about the colors though: there are many configuration files for emacs that handle coloring. usually they are located in your home directory (at ur school), and named something like '.emacs' or '.emacs.d' or similar. If you open those, they may refer to other files. If you copy over all those files from the school's comp to your home dir at home, then open emacs, it should be colored.



    also, if you instead don't like the x11 window-ed version of emacs (or emacs at all) you can try vi/vim. its a lot smaller, often a lot quicker to open, and it has a pretty nice x11 window'd version too.
  • Reply 10 of 10
    thunderpoitthunderpoit Posts: 709member
    nevermind, im stupid and tend to be dyslexic at times....
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