Software: Emacs Lisp

This package comes standard in XEmacs 19.15 and later, and Emacs 20.1 and later, but you should always be able to find the latest version here.

Don't use this in XEmacs. XEmacs has blink-paren.el already.

This program has been part of Emacs 19 for a long time. An older version was included in XEmacs starting with version 19.12; the file name is rsz-minibuf.el there.

Some history: Roland McGrath wrote the first version of this program for Emacs 18, inspired by an even earlier hack by Skip Montanaro called minibuf.el. In order to make it work Roland had to hack every entry in every minibuffer keymap (all four of them) rather severely by consing a wrapper around every binding to do the window resizing. I did the rewrite for Emacs 19 which, thanks to the addition of various hooks, made hacking keymaps unnecessary.

This package has been obsolesced in Emacs 21. It took 10 years, but the minibuffer and echo area have finally been integrated and automatic resizing of this window region is built into the editor now.

Starting with Emacs 19.30, a feature like this is already built in, and controlled with the variable suggest-key-bindings. XEmacs has a similar feature controlled by the variable teach-extended-commands-p. I find both of these variants somewhat irritating because you have to sit there and look at the little message about the keybinding you could have used, and meanwhile your command isn't getting executed; it wants to show you the keybindings first.

I prefer the behavior of my mode better, which shows you the keybindings after the command has completed. (Note: Emacs 20.1 and later adopts my behavior of showing the keybindings after finishing the command.) I also noticed that both Emacs and XEmacs 19 get it wrong for commands that read input from the user, because they depend on the value of this-command to figure out which command to look up. My version tries to look up the command in the command history, which makes it a little more accurate.

I'm not 100% sure where the idea for this feature originated. For years I had a wrapper around the execute-extended-command command to display key bindings in Emacs 18. It's entirely possible that I stole the idea from Roland McGrath and that he stole the idea in turn from Kyle Jones, who wrote a program called execcmd.el in 1989 (which I did not discover until I did some research for this document in 1997). Kyle, in turn, claims to have gotten the idea from Evan Bigall. Anyway, at some point I ripped the hooks out of my .emacs file and made a standalone package.

The objective is to make you stop working and take a break by getting up and walking around once in a while, like various ergonomics studies suggest you should do. It may help prevent you from getting Tendinitis or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, as I had for many years. Of course, it's only really useful if you live entirely in Emacs like I do. If you switch betwen windows a lot, the keystroke monitor will be useless.

One advantage of this package over older versions of the standard one is the ease with which you can enable/disable parts of the modeline display, or write your own extensions. One extension I wrote actually queries a POP server to determine how many unread messages you have incoming, and displays that.

This program is inspired by an earlier implemention written by Joe Wells called eval-expression-fix.el. That version was originally written for Emacs 18 and, while it worked with some quirky side effects in Emacs 19, created even more problems in Emacs 20 and didn't work in XEmacs at all. It also seems to be impossible to find Joe Well's original code anywhere on the internet, although I still have a copy available if anyone wants to see it.

You can save and restore arbitrary data when switching configurations. Among some of the default things saved are the window sizes and layout, buffer marks, the state of narrowed regions (so you can create two narrowed views of the same buffer simply by switching screens), menu bars, buffer order, etc.

I have not yet implemented persistent storage of this data across invocations of emacs.

Included is a documented set of library routines for writing your own extensions.

This package may be redundant with find-func.el, which is included as a standard part newer Emacs and XEmacs distributions. But my implementation predates it.

Emacs 21.3 implements native 256 color terminal support. At the time of this writing (2002-06-21) I have not yet verified whether this package interfaces properly with that builtin support or not.

It allows you to set enable-local-variables and enable-local-eval so that you can be queried about whether to set local variables in files when you visit them. You can set local variables never, always, ask first, or ask first only when the file being visited isn't owned by you.

Narrow buffers to hide the godforsaken multi-page copyright notices that appear at the beginning of most source files.

Unknown to me or to Ben Mesander (the primary author of this mode) at the time, Jamie Zawinski wrote a similar thing for Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs), called hide-copyleft.el. But I still think Ben came up with a better name.

I wrote this for converting mail and news article reply buffers so they would not contain 8-bit characters needlessly. Otherwise, the buffer has to be converted to quoted-printable before sending, and that makes it harder to read for the recipient if they do not have a MIME-capable reader.

This package is not needed in Emacs 21, which has addressed the problem internally. It does not work at all in XEmacs.

There is a whitespace.el included with Emacs since 1999, but that is not the same as this version. My version predates that one, but I declined to have mine bundled with Emacs for vague technical reasons.

Currently, synchronization is one-way; you cannot sync records back to BBDB yet.

Jamie Zawinski wrote this program originally (hence the name), but he doesn't use a PDA very much anymore, so I'm maintaining it for now.

Presently this program is integrated with GNUS, VM, and RMAIL, but it needs to interface better with the mailbox URL protocol in Mozilla so you can use the mail window instead of the browser window for viewing messages. (Note: this may never happen. Netscape completely broke the mailbox handling in Communicator 4.0, and it is unclear at this moment how the Mozilla 5.0 mail reader will work.)

Even though this package is obsolete, I still provide it in case it would be a useful base of code for anything else.

This package lets you use a Sendmail style aliases file instead. It even supports the :include: directive, so you don't need to store all your mail aliases in a single file.

Roland McGrath wrote this program originally, but later stopped using it in favor of Jamie Zawinski's Insidious Big Brother Database (BBDB). I still use this program, however, so I'm maintaining it now.

This program contains a number of databases of amusing texts. I am not the author of many of those texts, but I did write all the code from scratch.

Spookmime insinuates itself into VM when loaded so that VM uses these generated boundaries when sending or forwarding multipart MIME messages. A hook for using it with GNUS is also provided, but must be enabled manually.

I've written an interface to these routines for VM, one emacs-based mail reader. Those stubs are in a separate file, vm-vcard.el. Recent versions of GNUS already know how to use this library if it's installed. Hooks for BBDB and TM are in the works.

If you write stubs for other mail user agents, please send them to me!

For example, my regular address is friedman@splode.com. However, I still sometimes use the address friedman@prep.ai.mit.edu when I'm sending email that's related to the GNU Project. Using this package, if someone sends email to the latter address, my From and Reply-To headers are automatically filled in with that address so that it looks like I am continuing to correspond from MIT, even though the rest of the time my correspondence looks like it comes from my regular address.

In order for this to work, all you have to set a lisp variable to contain a list of all your known email addresses and load this file as part of your emacs initialization.

This package exists because I lobbied Richard Stallman to make this the standard behavior for shell mode, but he thought it was too complicated.

This package implements general-purpose behavior. For most interactive processes, you will want to use the higher-level interface comint-popup.el, which uses this package.

As an example, recent versions of the ftp command have a tick command which will output a running counter of bytes transferred instead of writing out hash marks. Whenever the counter is to be updated, the new counter is preceded by a carriage return so that the old counter is overwritten on most displays. Ordinarily in emacs, the carriage return would be displayed literally followed by the new output. However, if you put proc-filter-shell-output-filter on comint-output-filter-functions, the output is displayed as intended on a terminal.

The aforementioned filter presently handles the display of other program output as well, including scp, mpg123, cdparanoia, and more. Writing new handlers or other filters is easy.

There are two minor modes defined. The first mode protects a buffer only so long as a process is still associated with it. You can use this to keep from killing your *shell* buffer until you exit the shell process first.

The second mode unconditionally prevents a buffer from being killed. Turning off the minor mode makes the buffer killable again.

This is a mode written originally by Kyle Jones, but I've made several trivial modifications over the years.

There is one caveat for emacs lisp programs which expect that their network streams are really internal streams and not inferior process objects: The value returned by process-status for open network streams is open, whereas it will return run for regular processes. Process sentinels and filters might be confused by this. It's best to check for both return values, but not all programs do this.

Historical note: the code for this program was the starting point for ZenIRC.

rlogin.el has been distributed with Emacs 19 since its first release, and with XEmacs since version 19.12, I believe. The most up-to-date version can always be found here.

As of May 1997, many of my own programs use these forms, so I provide a stub for backward-compatibility with earlier versions of emacs.

I use the function build-subdirectory-list (and its friends) to initialize my load-path, among other things. At the root of my lisp directories I have ".build-subdirs.els" files which specify subdirectories which should also go into the path.

This library was inspired by the what-domain command defined in mail-extr.el, which is shipped with Emacs. This is a more feature-complete version: you can search by 2-letter, 3-letter, or numeric country codes, and you can display all domains whose country name match a regular expression. And this version is probably more up to date than what is shipped with older Emacs distributions.

Let's face it: languages are more fun when they are peppered with excessive diacritical marks. I've always appreciated how the French really outdid themselves with Vietnamese, surpassing their own older written alphabet. It's probably too late to enhance English in this manner, but there's no reason you can't sprinkle random, gratuitous diacritical marks in your text anyway. This program provides commands to do just that.

You'll have to get your own sound files to use with this. As some people might have guessed from the package name, I use an interjection frequently used by Homer J. Simpson.

Generate random flames and insults. Richard Stallman removed it from the Emacs 19 distribution for copyright reasons (neither of us could locate Ian Batten, the original author of the emacs lisp version, at the time). That version is still distributed with XEmacs as of version 21.4.

My version is a complete rewrite.

Over the years I think people have written automatic ``geek code decoders'' so you can translate what this ridiculous babble actually means. It is my sincere hope that the pseudocode generated by my program will crash those decoders. Well, I can dream, can't I?

      Tomorrow your wonderful pet piglet will adjust your girdle.  Beware of
      someone you know bearing a deadly disease.  Days from now wearing
      clothes may seem expensive.  You will meet a wallflower this week.
      You'll later be a Borg.  12 is your lucky number.
      

Kibo (James Parry) wrote this program, basing it on the Emacs 18 implementation of flame.el. I've rewritten it.

      Here is your shopping list:
      (1) Idiotic frivolity confirmers
      (2) Claustrophobic chowder
      (3) Bicentennial travesty
      (4) Chaotic ecclesiastical Garden Weasel selectors
      

      ATTACKED BY DESTROYER 12W 23N. SINKING. U-471.
      TORPEDOED BY TINY GNATS. SINKING. U-469.
      BOMBED BY SPACE-TIME VORTEX. LEAVE BOAT. U-158.
      TORPEDOED BY NETSCAPE. CREW UNMOTIVATED. SINKING. U-719.
      

Note that vcards have rendered some signatures so boring, they're not even worth warlording. Ah, for the good old days.

      Have you ever thought it was unhealthy to have three Ann Arbor
      Ambassador terminals to defend against spinach?  Or tasted brussel
      sprouts and thought it was tasty roadkill?  Or been assaulted by
      crazed Korean traffic cops in a garbage dump?  You will.  And the
      company that will bring it to you: AT&T.
      

This is the start of a Scheme interpreter for Emacs, written entirely in elisp. (Scheme is a lexically-scoped dialect of lisp with tail recursion elimination, first-class procedures, and first class continuations a standard part of the language definition.)

There are some major pieces missing in this implementation including continuations, a reader, and a great many R4RS procedures. I think most of the required syntax (except for low-level macros) is there, the implementation has general tail call elimination, and even has a few extras like first class environments. But I wouldn't call it even halfway complete.

I doubt it's worth taking this implementation ``all the way''. It was fun to write, but it's not practical for anything.