🚀 go-pugleaf

I have questions along similar lines, only more so :-)

I am now happily posting, safe and sound from inside my trusty copy of
GNU Emacs 18.57.1 on an RS/6000 (AIX 3.1.5). I tried, really I did, to
get to netnews and my mail from Lucid Emacs 19.4, but, so far, no joy.
I was a converted Epochian but, alas, the copy on my rs6k developed a
fatal malaise which I have yet to diagnose, and it seemed like an
auspicious time to look into Lucid. Here's the deal:

(a) GNUS
	M-x gnus appears to load and fire up GNUS, which then informs
	me it is trying to connect to the proper NNTP server, and...
	nothing. I dies. Lucid freezes and has to be killed. I am
	using whatever GNUS that Lucid loads out of the box (.../lisp/gnus).

	GNUS from "normal" GNU Emacs works like a champ. I can't
	figure it.

(b) mh-e
	Again, M-x mh-rmail appears to load the code and do SOMETHING,
	but I get "No current message" in the miniffer, and a M-r
	tells me my inbox is empty; in fact, it has over 800 messages in it,
	which mh-e quite happily finds from "normal" GNU Emacs.

(c) ~/.emacs
	How does one go about writing a .emacs file that will reliably
	work with GNU Emacs, Epoch and Lucid Emacs? I'm afraid the
	info node is rather scant on what I would consider to be
	useful information in this vein (an entire tree, or at least
	one node describing Lucid for the Epochian would be Very
	Nice). After fiddling, I came up with the (to my mind very
	gross) hack:

		(setq running-lucid (not (null (string-match
						emacs-version
						".*Lucid"))))

	And attempted to "ifdef" offending bits of Epoch- and GNU
	Emacs-style code away. I managed to get rid of init-file
	errors, but things just aint right (see (a) and (b)). I am
	using the SAME .emacs for Lucid and GNU Emacs (e.g. mh-progs,
	etc.).

(d) Separate minibuf
	I'm afraid I don't quite understand the followup to
	dschieb's message from brian pointing to the commented-out code
	in screen.el; should this code be uncommented out and
	then a new lemacs dumped? Has anyone done this?

(e) Scrollbars
	I cannot find any mention of scrollbars anywhere in info. Do
	they not exist for Lucid? I find nothing more annoying than to
	be forced to switch between mouse and keyboard to do simple
	things; now that you've given me pull-down and (in info) popup
	menus to navigate, how annoying that I must C-v/M-v to
	actually navigate the text in a node (using the mouse to pull
	the text around by selecting it is a poor second choice).

(f) VM!?
	This ain't really a Lucid gripe, but the VM info node doesn't
	mention MH anywhere, so I assume it isn't compatible with it?
	If not, is there any clean way to convert a tree of MH folders
	to VM "format" (is there such a thing?).

(g) Lucid FAQ? # Users?
	Is there a Lucid FAQ anywhere? Should one really join the
	mailing list mentioned in the README? How many folks are using
	it out there? Is this not the appropos forum for discussing it?

My real agenda...
	
Someone posted here before about wanting an integrated system for
reading news and mail that could handle MIME (at least the basic stuff
like multiple fonts, etc), etc., and said that Epoch seemed like the
perfect way to do this. Well, having been a die-hard Andrew Messages
user for years now, I've been spoiled by HAVING such a facility and
taking it for granted; since my main machine happens to be this rs6k
at home, connected to the universe via a SLIP connection, things like
Andrew and AFS look less appealing, so I started casting around for an
interim solution. Even though I've been having some annoying problems
with Lucid, it looks to me like it is even MORE suitable for
implementing such a thing than Epoch is (faces seem a lot easier to
deal with than zones, plus you have Xpm etc.). Is anyone actively
pursuing such a thing?  Something simple like a generic metamail hook
and modifications to mh-e (or VM for all I care) and gnus to use it
might begin to do the trick.

Finally, congrats to the implementors of Lucid Emacs. It looks like it
will be very nice once I get a couple things ironed out. One thing
though... we really do need a multi-threaded Emacs, so that I can read
news and mail and work without having annoying things like network I/O
to the NNTP server hang me out to dry. Is this planned for 19?

Cheers,
		-- Sean
--
Sean Levy, n-dim Group, EDRC, CMU, 5000 Forbes Ave, PGH, PA 15213
Email: snl+@cmu.edu, Phone: +1 412 268 5221, Fax: +1 412 268 5229