Re: [Sheflug] EMacs for mail preferably with PGP/GPG.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Barrie" == Barrie Bremner <TheEnglishman [at] ecosse.net> writes:

    Barrie> I actually don't use XEmacs, but rather Emacs (under X),
    Barrie> if that makes any difference.

There are three big differences:

  - XEmacs does multi-media -- proportional fonts, images, sound;
    Emacs 20 doesn't do any of them, and Emacs 21 will get
    proportional fonts and images but how well they'll work, and how
    long before Emacs crashes on you is anybody's guess for a .0
    release.

  - XEmacs comes with far more packages correctly set up (or nearly
    so) out of the box, such as tcl-mode, PSGML, hm--html-menus,
    AUC-TeX, and VM.  Vendors (such as VM) are starting to provide
    "XEmacs packages" which you can download from the net and install
    or update themselves like RPMs do.  Emacs 21 will not get a
    packaging system (and Emacs 22 may not get one either).
    Furthermore, Emacs 21 will have older versions of most packages
    because the Emacs team insists on "integrating" them with Emacs,
    which takes a lot of time.  (In some cases it does make things
    smoother, but it's not worth the delay for most people IMHO.)

  - I don't do "that other Emacs", so my advice there is not going to
    be nearly so good.  :-(

    Barrie> Emacs doesn't seem to have VM, only RMail v5.

Rmail: just say no.  It's never been MIME-aware, I think it knows
enough now to be dangerous.  It's a Stallman-crock of really hairy
code that does what rms wants it to do, but can't be easily customized
for other purposes.

You can get VM from all kinds of places.
http://www.wonderworks.com/vm/ is the place to start.

Or if you want to stick with Emacs, you can use Gnus.  The version
distributed with Emacs 20.x is two years old now, and knows little
about MIME.  But when Emacs 21 gets released RSN you'll get an
approximation to the current version of last summer, which is pretty
good.  (XEmacs generally lags larsi by about 2 weeks -- 2 months, by
comparison, and you can update the package over the net when updates
are released.)

    Barrie> XEmacs is actually complaining about the contents of my
    Barrie> .emacs file, by the looks of things.

No surprise there.  What is it saying?

    Barrie> When it comes to customising XEmacs, I'm lost. I can
    Barrie> select the customize-> applications->mail bit OK, but then
    Barrie> my brain starts to hurt.

The customize stuff is a bit OTT, isn't it.  Once you get used to it,
it's not so bad.  Sorry I can't help more than that :-(


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