kaplan@m.cs.uiuc.edu (12/15/89)
We have developed a modified version of Gnu Emacs called Epoch. This document outlines its new features and how to get hold of it. Enjoy. Welcome to Epoch beta release 1.0. Epoch is a modifed version of GNU Emacs that provides the following additional facilities: o Multiple X-windows o Ability to set window attributes (color, font, etc) o Ability to have regions of text within buffers with different color attributes (a basis for buttons) o Asynchronous communication with other X clients through the property mechanism Epoch is based on GNU Emacs 18.52. However, extensive modifications cover many of the bug-fixes in releases 18.52-18.55. This document provides only a brief overview of Epoch. More detail is available in the manual included in this distribution. This release contains several parts. It includes a truncated version of the GNU Emacs 18.52 distribution: All the C, Lisp source and utility programs are there, but the INFO and documentation components have been omitted. These are identical to the Gnu Emacs release, anyway. The documentation of the epoch-specific additions are in the epoch-man directory in LaTeX format. Epoch is designed to work best when used with a "programmable" window manager like GWM. A copy of the latest version of GWM (1.5.1.1) is included in the release. HOW TO GET EPOCH Epoch is available by anonymous ftp from cs.uiuc.edu (128.174.252.1), in directory pub/epoch-files. There are two subdirectories: gwm contains the gwm source, and epoch contains the epoch source. All compressed (144-bit compress) tar files. Installation instructions are in the epoch user manual. They are identical to installing GNU Emacs, except you must have the X11R3 libraries and include files available. COMMUNICATING WITH US AND OTHER EPOCH USERS You can join the epoch mailing list by sending mail to epoch-request@cs.uiuc.edu uunet!uiucdcs!epoch-request epoch-request%cs.uiuc.edu@uiucvmd.bitnet to send messages to the list, replace "epoch-request" by "epoch" in the above. CAVEATS etc We have been using epoch in-house (in-school?) for the last 6 months or so so we think it is fairly stable. Please report any bugs or problems you may have. Epoch will NOT work on ASCII Terminals WHAT YOU NEED TO KEEP AFTER INSTALLATION The installation will produce a binary file called epoch in the src directory. This and the DOC files produced in the etc directory are the only thing you need to keep from the distribution, if you already have GNU Emacs installed. The lisp files should be identical to those in the emacs distribution. We do suggest that you also keep and use the file epoch.el in the epoch-lisp-files directory, and copy the relevent parts of the .emacs in that directory to your .emacs file. Also, there are some minor problems with the standard x-mouse.el code; you may want to use the smk-x-mouse.el code instead.