Editorial Conversion
Fear not, I have not strayed from the one true path and still adhere to the practices of the Church of Emacs. For the last six years or so, though, I have stuck by the XEmacs fork. I’m at least going to pretend that six years ago it did things that GNU Emacs couldn’t that I wanted it to do. In the process of setting up my main work computer with Arch Linux, a departure from my longtime Debian/Ubuntu preference, I encountered problems getting my editor buffed into the same shape I’m used to.
So I’ve gone GNU. If you just install GNU Emacs and open up an editor, it will look horrible. Don’t let this put you off. The same was true of XEmacs, actually, but this manages to look even worse. There is much to look forward to, including a mode in which Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v are copy and paste like in every other software application in existence (except vi, where doing anything involves blood sacrifice) and use of the GTK toolkit. If the only reason you’re using XEmacs is because I installed it on your computer while you weren’t looking and then sent you my config file (there’s at least one of you), I highly recommend trying this:
Install GNU Emacs, probably just called emacs in most package repositories. Or get it here if you’re into that kind of thing. Once you’ve got that, you’ll want the tabbar mode, at least if you want to be as cool as I am. This is available in the emacs-extra package in Debian or Ubuntu (I think). If you have access to this, skip this next part for now, and come back to it if need be later.
Otherwise you’ll want to grab this tar file from Emhacks. Incidentally this is version 1.3 and the internet is awash with rumor of there being a 2.0, which I cannot find anywhere. If you see it, let me know. Unzip to get the tabbar.el file and open emacs.
Enter M-x (M is short for Meta, usually Alt),
then type byte-compile-file in the line at the bottom of the editor window and press Enter.
You should now have a file called tabbar.elc in the same directory as the original. You’ll need to put this in a directory searched by emacs, I used something like
cp ./tabbar.elc /usr/share/emacs/23.1/lisp/ (you’ll probably need root privileges to do the copy).
Lastly, you’ll need a sexy .emacs file. This goes in your home directory. You can use mine, if you’d like. If you’re big into tabs, you might want to define your own key bindings to move to next or previous tabs. If you’re willing to play around, code like this could be added to .emacs to give you that ability:
(tabbar-mode 1) (define-key global-map [(<keys>)] 'tabbar-backward) (define-key global-map [(<keys>)] 'tabbar-forward)