12 TUGboat, Volume 18 (1997), No. 1
Software & To ols
A GNU Emacs editing mo de for
METAFONT
and
METAPOST
sources
Ulrik Vieth
Abstract
This article announces the release of
meta-mode.el
,
a
GNU
Emacs editing mode for
METAFONT
and
METAPOST
source les.
meta-mode.el
provides a
number of features commonly found in
GNU
Emacs
editing mo des for programming languages, suchas
automatic indenting of source code, syntactic high-
lighting, symbol completion for partially-typ ed key-
words, motion commands to move to the beginning
or end of the enclosing environment, or commands
to comment out or reindentenvironments, regions,
or buers. An interface to running
METAFONT
or
METAPOST
in a shell buer from within Emacs is
currently under development and maybeintegrated
into
meta-mode.el
later.
1 Intro duction
The
GNU
Emacs
1
editor [1, 2] is one of the most
widely used editors on Unix systems and some other
platforms. As one of its most remarkable features it
provides a vast numb er of sp ecialized editing modes
for a large variety of text formatting or programming
languages. While supp ort for editing T
E
XorL
A
T
E
X
les has been included in Emacs for many years,
either as part of the standard
GNU
Emacs distribu-
tion or through the optional
AUC
-T
E
X package [3],
no such mode-sp ecic editing supp ort existed so far
for the somewhat esoteric programming languages
of
METAFONT
and
METAPOST
.
When I started using
METAPOST
on a regular
basis in early 1995, shortly after I had completed
my rst port of
METAPOST
,integrating it into the
Web2C/Kpathsea distribution, I wasn't to o much
concerned about the lack of editing support since I
was primarily interested in getting acquainted with
METAPOST
so that I could get some data plotted.
During the course of time, however, esp ecially after
I started gaining a little experience with Emacs Lisp
programming [4, 5], I became increasingly unhappy
about b eing stuck with fundamental mo de for edit-
ing
METAPOST
sources in Emacs.
1
While this article only refers to
GNU
Emacs, most of it
should b e applicable to the XEmacs editor as well. Although
meta-mode.el
was develop ed exclusively under
GNU
Emacs,
it was tried to make sure that everything will also work under
XEmacs.