Index of John Sturdy's emacs pages

Handsfree Emacs

Emacs Gamepad

Emacs is sometimes described as an extensible text editor; I think it's better described by saying that it compares with other text editors as a Land Rover does with a car. A while after realizing this, I bought a Land Rover.

Its extension language is elisp (Emacs Lisp).

I recommend using the ratpoison window manager with Emacs.

A tabular tutorial

You can't learn Emacs in tablet form, but you can learn quite a few more commands from my page GNUemacs: beyond the tutorial.

What is unusual about my emacs?

One of the unusual things about my emacs (which, like many, is heavily customized) is that I can do a lot of operations without using my hands, and also using a gamepad instead of, or as well as, the keyboard. See A different GNUemacs experience for a description of my attempts to develop the advanced editor of the future.

Handsfree emacs

See my Handsfree emacs page.

Using a gamepad with Emacs

Sometimes Emacs is accused of causing RSI. This isn't a fair accusation; the problem is not with Emacs, but with taking a typewriter-style keyboard (designed in the 19th century, for typing letters) a long way beyond what it is designed for, and using it as a controller.

It makes much more sense to control Emacs with something designed as a controller; furthermore, a controller designed for comfortable, fast, intensive use. In fact, something designed after, rather than before, the idea of ergonomics was widespread. A gamepad meets these requirements pretty well, when used with a suitable suite of commands.

My emacs-lisp collection

You can browse my collection (which is quite extensive by now -- 270 .el files at the time of writing) and download and use whatever you like.

I have further elisp on SourceForge, to provide versatile cursor access -- lots of kinds of movement all accessed through the arrow keys (include navigation between the kinds of movement!) -- or even better, map these onto pedals and offload some of the work from your hands!

Muse and planner

I've recently discovered emacs-muse and planner, and am very impressed.

Getting emacs

See the list of ftp sites for GNU software.

You can also browse the cvs tree.

Notes on GNUemacs source

Several times I've posted things I've written that it turns out are already done in the distribution. So now, I'm setting out to read right through the sources, to reduce my re-invention of wheels. Really for my own interest, I'm making notes, but I'll share them here (and it also makes it harder for me to lose them!)

My future plans for my GNUemacs setup

Some time I mean to integrate emacspeak into my emacs setup. I already use vr-mode, and would like to experiment with using emacs by two-way voice communication.

I've bought a Symbian-based smartphone, and was thinking tentatively about an attempt at porting GNUemacs to Symbian; but the Symbian environment didn't look at all friendly for such a complex part-time project, so I'll wait until I have a Linux phone before trying to run GNUemacs on it.

Building Emacs

Notes on source