XEmacs configuration help

[elendil]

HELP!

I thouht I would abandon Scite as my linux editor and go for XEmacs instead, but XEmacs is horribly configured, as we all know.

I've tried finding information, googling, and trying random options for hours on end now...

My problem is currently this:
 Apparantly it is close to impossible (or at least rather difficult) to make emacs NOT indent stuff by itself, which is rather annoying when it does it wrong. I think my major gripe right now is with tab size. It indents four tabs (or spaces, I don't know, really), whenever you hit the tab button. Do you know how I can make that 2?

I'm trying to use emacs for java programming, but I was hoping the tab-size could be set in a general way.

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.  
 

[Holley]

There will be a way, but it'll be under the regular Emacs config, rather than XEmacs (which is only really a graphical front).  Emacs does tabs as four spaces in all it's incarnations - I've used it under Linux 1.1 through 2.4, AIX and HPUX.  If you're using a reasonable resolution you could always increase the number of columns so it's not such a big problem.

Sorry I can't be of more help, maybe the best place to ask is on a Linux board :-?

[elendil]

It's not really so much the size as it is the style. I have gotten used to use tab size 2 and I would sincerely hate it to suddenly have fractions of code with a different tabsize, or load up a tabsize 2 document and change stuff using tabsize 4 etc, what a mess. And yes, I use spaces instead of tabs for several reasons. Otherwise this would of course not have been as much of a problem as it is.

Or was, actually. I spent a day and a half searching, changing variables, guessing syntaxes, bugging linux geeks etc, and finally after having changed c-basic-offset variable under C-group to 2 (and lots of other stuff I've forgotten), it seemed to work...well not right away, of course...setting the variable didn't make it so, a restart of the program was required, which puzzled me for yet another while.

It's stupid really. The editor is really quite decent, but it takes far longer to configure it properly than it takes to write OS4 without using the 3.1 source - unless you've studied emacs for a century or two.

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[Holley]

Nice to hear you got there in the end!  Emacs won't change indentations on existing text - adding something that would auto-indent would add the tab from where you started adding from (ie. start 2 spaces in, one tab would be 6 spaces in), and basically pressing the tab key does just put in four spaces (there's no 'tab' characer as such, hence you can change what it does as a variable).

While I like unix in principal it is by far the most difficult OS to work with on the desktop, even if you do use a fancy window manager :-(