GNU emacs editing support

Last updates: Wed Aug 6 19:04:33 2003     Fri Sep 24 08:40:42 2004     Thu Nov 4 06:15:34 2004     Sun Sep 24 11:31:12 2006     Mon Dec 12 18:52:08 2011

This directory contains a large collection of libraries for enhanced editing with the powerful GNU emacs text editor. In early 2003, they consist of over 950 functions, and more than 180 customization variables. They have been developed over two decades at the University of Utah by Nelson H. F. Beebe. Some of these functions are translations from the TECO language used in DEC TOPS-20 Emacs (1976--1990). These libraries are in daily use, and have proved exceptionally useful, stable, and reliable. They, and emacs, have helped significantly to improve their author's productivity: so much so, that he finds a workstation without emacs of no interest whatever!

Copyright Status

Although these libraries are not part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Project, they were developed with similar views about the benefits of sharing our work with others, especially when that work is carried out as academic research at publicly-funded institutions.

Many of these libraries carry a copyright statement assigning rights to the Free Software Foundation. Many others do not, because in the past, their author viewed them as being in the public domain, much like several large well-known libraries in numerical analysis (ACM and TOMS Algorithms, Applied Statistics Algorithms, EISPACK, ELEFUNT, FUNPACK, LINPACK, LAPACK, ...). Sadly, abuses in the software industry have made it advisable for software to be copyrighted: unless otherwise noted in these files, their author now considers them covered by the GNU General Public License. As new versions are released, they will likely be augmented with explicit copyright statements.

Many of these libraries are for support of BibTeX bibliography database editing, and some of them use external programs written in the awk programming language that are also available here.

Package archive bundles are available in several functionally-equivalent distribution formats with identical contents: .jar (Java archive), .tar.bz2 (bzip2'ed UNIX tar archive), .tar.gz (gzipped UNIX tar archive), .zip (InfoZip), and .zoo (zoo), together with companion contents listings ending in -lst. Each unpacks into a subdirectory named by the basename of the distribution file, e.g., hash-1.00.