[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Emacs work: porting to Maemo

[From: Neil Jerram]

Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 07:22:03PM +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 14:08 -0500, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
>> > I'm currently working on porting Emacs to Maemo,
>> 
>> It's a small point, but isn't emacs an odd choice for porting to maemo,
>> with emacs being a text editor designed for keyboard use, and all maemo
>> platforms having no keyboard.  If you have a bluetooth keyboard paired,
>> emacs will just work, otherwise using it would be a whole new world of
>> pain surely?
>
> Maybe, and maybe not.  For an experienced vim user, vim with the 770's
> virtual keyboard is more convenient than Notes.  I speak from
> experience.

I've been able to get some work done in Emacs via VNC.  It turns out
that there are either menu items or ESC- bindings for most of the
operations that I commonly need.  Menu items are easy with the mouse,
and for ESC the hardware key works.

Interestingly - given Ted's involvement - the thing that's most
clearly suboptimal for me at the moment is Gnus.  (Perhaps because I
use it so much!)  In particular, it would be nice to be able to select
a message from the summary buffer using the mouse.  Perhaps I just
need a custom binding to do that.  I have found this useful -

(define-key gnus-summary-mode-map "'"
  'gnus-summary-mark-as-spam)

- because ' is quicker than "ESC d" and I seem to get a lot of spam.

I believe that using Emacs directly on the 770 would be broadly
similar to what I currently do through VNC, but obviously would also
give us more options, such as using Gnus for local mail on the 770; so
I look forward to the results of Ted's work very much.

Regards,
     Neil