Announcing Easymacs: an all-in-one Emacs configuration for newbies

[Peter Heslin]

Easymacs is an easy-to-learn, one-size-fits-all configuration for new
users of GNU Emacs. It sets up key bindings that conform to a common
denominator of the Gnome/KDE/OS X/Microsoft Windows human interface
guidelines, and provides function-key bindings for other powerful Emacs
features. It is fully documented, and the new user can productively edit
text right away, without going through the Emacs tutorial. Many
commonly-used functions can be accessed without having to learn the
"chords", or multiple keystrokes that Emacs uses by default.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Emacs/Easymacs/

It comes with the current stable AUCTeX and has a number of other
conveniences for editing LaTeX documents, including auto-detection of
the language for spell-checking via Babel commands.

Peter

[Alexander Tsyplakov]

A great job of making this weird software a little bit more human.
Still there are some freaks. I've got 2 directories and 5 files in C:\
root after running Easymacs. And also an "auto" subdirectory and
several auxiliary files in foo.tex location. What is the need for all
this garbage?

[pub...@heslin.eclipse.co.uk]

"Alexander Tsyplakov" <t...@land4.nsu.ru> writes:

> A great job of making this weird software a little bit more human.
> Still there are some freaks. I've got 2 directories and 5 files in C:\
> root after running Easymacs.

C:\ is probably your home directory, and some bits of Emacs want to save
information there. If you want these files and directories to go
somewhere else, set your $HOME environment variable, or put a line like
this in your .emacs configuration file:

(setenv "HOME" "C:/path/to/my/home/directory")

> And also an "auto" subdirectory and several auxiliary files in foo.tex
> location. What is the need for all this garbage?

The auto subdirectory is used by AUCTeX to cache some information, which
is particularly useful when managing multi-file documents.

Peter