3.2 Emacs user interface
========================

Besides running SINGULAR in an ASCII-terminal, SINGULAR might
also be run within Emacs. Emacs (or, XEmacs which is very similar) is a
powerful and freely available text editor, which, among others,
provides a framework for the implementation of interactive user
interfaces. Starting from version 1.3.6, SINGULAR provides such an
implementation, the so-called SINGULAR Emacs mode, or Emacs user
interface.

Generally, we recommend to use the Emacs interface,
instead of the ASCII-terminal interface: The Emacs interface does not
only provide everything the ASCII-terminal interface provides, but
offers much more. Among others, it offers
* color-highlighting
* truncation of long lines
* folding of input and output
* TAB-completion for help topics
* highlighting of matching parentheses
* key-bindings and interactive menus for most user interface commands and
for basic SINGULAR commands (such as loading of libraries and files)
* a mode for running interactive SINGULAR demonstrations
* convenient ways to edit SINGULAR input files
* interactive customization of nearly all aspects of the user-interface.

To use the SINGULAR-Emacs interface you need to have Emacs version
20 or higher, or XEmacs
version 20.3 or higher installed on your system. These
editors can be downloaded for most hard- and software platforms
(including Windows
95/98/NT, but excluding the Macintosh), from either
<http://www.fsf.org/software/emacs/emacs.html> (Emacs), from
<http://www.xemacs.org> (XEmacs), or from our ftp site at
<ftp://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/pub/Math/Singular/utils/>. The
differences between Emacs and XEmacs w.r.t. the  SINGULAR-Emacs
interface are marginal - which editor to use is mainly a matter of personal
preferences.

The simplest way to start-up SINGULAR in its Emacs interface is by
running the program ESingular which is contained in the Singular
distribution. Alternatively, SINGULAR can be started within an
already running Emacs - see Running SINGULAR under Emacs for
details.

The next section gives  a tutorial-like introduction to Emacs. This
introductory section is
followed by sections which explain the functionality of various aspects
of the Emacs user interface in more detail: how to start/restart/kill
SINGULAR within Emacs, how to run an interactive demonstration, how
to customize the Emacs user interface, etc. Finally, the 20 most
important commands of the Emacs interface together with their key
bindings are listed.

* A quick guide to Emacs::
* Running SINGULAR under Emacs::
* Demo mode::
* Customization of the Emacs interface::
* Editing SINGULAR input files with Emacs::
* Top 20 Emacs commands::

<font size="-1">
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; User manual for <a href="http://www.singular.uni-kl.de/"><i>Singular</i></a> version 2-0-4, October 2002,
generated by <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/"><i>texi2html</i></a>.
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