tphyahoo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Oh wise and whimsical monks, I am on winxp with activestate, and have been thinking of starting to use cygwin and emacs to manage my perl.

Has anyone an opinion of which flavor of emacs I should use? One with a native windows installer, and never mind x-cygwin for now? Emacs on Cygwin? X-Emacs on cygwin?

I'm not trying to start a flame war, and I have looked at Editors for perl. I would jsut like to know if anyone has dinked around with this and has an opinion as to which flavor of emacs will get me up and running fastest with windows, and why.

When I did this I while ago I do remember it was kind of a pain to get started, ie, copying and pasting with the clipboard was nontransparent and required changing some settings. If there's any kind of tutorials on emacs/cygwin gotchas that I should read first this time around, would like to hear about this as well. Thanks!

PS Emacs vs xEmacs in case anyone wants a look.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by monarch (Priest) on May 31, 2005 at 09:54 UTC
    Short answer: NTEmacs.

    I have been using NTEmacs (not Xemacs) since 1998. And I've never looked back. I also use emacs on XWindows and emacs-nox in text mode. All these flavours of emacs are driven from my same .emacs files.

    NTEmacs is great. I prefer it over XEmacs cause XEmacs appears to be missing bits. I could be wrong but I just prefer the raw power of the real thing.

    I use cperl-mode mostly, and combinations of html-mode/mmm-mode for editing MASON files.

    Emacs is hard to learn, but not as hard to learn as vi, as you can customise everything out of Emacs. cua-mode.el is a great method of simulating cut and paste behaviour that Win32 has.

    The Emacs FAQ is a great thing to read, particularly the NTEmacs FAQ. You'll find it linked from the Emacs FAQ.

    I also keep clear of Cygwin.. I tried it once, now I much prefer using ActiveState perl for Win32, and MinGW if I need to compile native C apps.

    A Note About ActiveState Perl

    Frequently one wants to install modules off CPAN, and sometimes activestate doesn't have a pre-packaged PPM suitable. In this case running through the make process for that module is something you'll have to do.

    If you download MinGW then be sure to install the CPAN module ExtUtils::FakeConfig. Once you've done that then you can make pretty much any module off CPAN by typing make -mConfig_m makefile.pl. That will generate a makefile compatible with the MinGW compiler should the module include C routines that require compilation.

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Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by castaway (Parson) on May 31, 2005 at 12:18 UTC
    ComparativeEmacsology

    Personally, I use a native GNU emacs compile on Windows, and GNUEmacs on Linux.. I have no idea why, just happens to workforme.

    C.

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Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by wazoox (Prior) on May 31, 2005 at 11:36 UTC
    Well I have to disagree with monarch, sorry :) I find XEmacs quite good. On windows it runs fine, with antialiased fonts, it integrates properly enough to the desktop and is quite slick (Emacs looks rough). OK, to be fair I have to say I ditched windows away for seral years now anyway, and I will never look back :)
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Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by xorl (Deacon) on May 31, 2005 at 13:04 UTC
    I prefer Xemacs. One word of caution, when you install xemacs on Windows, it will ask if you want a native or cygwin install. I have found I need both. tramp only seems to work with the native install and efs seems to only work with the cygwin install. At least this is the case for me. Others might be smart enough to make it all work.

    Frankly I try to avoid Windows. Cygwin is really cool but you're still on Windows and there are just too many things that can and do go wrong.

    For writting perl scripts on windows, I've also found that using a text editor that was written to run just on Windows is ususally better if you're stuck on Windows. Editplus and Textpad are good choices. Just google for "Windows text editor"

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Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by strat (Canon) on Jun 01, 2005 at 06:39 UTC

    Btw: do you know dotfiles.com? There you find a lot of configuration files. For (NT)Emacs, I use a slightly adopted version of Steve Ackermann's win32 perl customised Emacs which gives you some additional shortcuts which may be helpful for a perl programmer. If you change some pathes inside, it also runs perfectly unter Linux/Solaris and maybe most other Unices... If you want to have a look at my little enhancements, just msg me

    Best regards,
    perl -e "s>>*F>e=>y)\*martinF)stronat)=>print,print v8.8.8.32.11.32"

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Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by jacques (Priest) on May 31, 2005 at 20:20 UTC
    I know your question is about emacs, but I use vim on cygwin. Since you are on windows, you can also try gvim, which I like a lot:

    gvim

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Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by tphyahoo (Vicar) on Jun 28, 2005 at 09:56 UTC
    This looks cool as well. http://www.cua.dk/cua.html "CUA-mode is a complete replacement for the pc-select, delete-selection, and s-region packages, with one important improvement: it (almost) transparently allows you to use the C-z, C-x, C-c, and C-v keys as you are accustomed to on systems like Windows."
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Re: OT: Xemacs or Emacs?
by metaperl (Curate) on Jun 29, 2005 at 17:30 UTC
    If I were you, I'd reach for a real perl powerhorse: pure Linux. Either run vmware so you can run XP and Linux side by side or double-boot, but Cygwin and win32 perl are just so-so at best.
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