So what?

If you have to deal with UNIX or at least with programming, then you have to be comfortable with editing files, for which task you need a handy text editor.

That was mainly my starting point when I came across MicroEmacs, which is the only editor that satisfies most of my needs.

Features

• Small in size and rather fast!
• Available for all major platforms (Windows/DOS, UNIX)
• Works without a graphical user interface like Windows or X, textmode is sufficient
• color support, syntax highlighting
• mouse support with X and Windows
• extensible through its own makro language
• stability
• standard Emacs shortcuts for most functions
• built-in file manager (usefull esp.on Windows)
• GPL licensed

What's missing?

Unfortunately JASSPA's MicroEmacs lacks the ability to handle UTF-8 files that contain characters outside the ASCII subset of UTF-8 (in other words: only ASCII based files work). Although today this is an increasing drawback I can still live with it considering my system administration and LaTeX needs.

Screenshots

SSH session in color

1, 2, 3 mail reader

Windows native

configuration dialog, file manager, choose files with the mouse, help (clickable), HTML mode and Tetris games

Linux (X version)

Setup page, Patience game, file manager and plain view

Reference Card

I wrote a refcard for MicroEmacs, because when I started working with XEmacs I found its refcard very usefull.

Download: MicroEmacs Reference Card (PDF 1.4)
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Debian and Ubuntu packages

Here you can get the latest packages for Debian Lenny (5.0), Debian Etch (4.0), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on i386 machines. In order to install them do the following:

1. Add these two line to the file /etc/apt/sources.list:

   deb http://jamesie.de/debian <dist> main
   

   #deb-src http://jamesie.de/debian dapper main
   

   where <dist> is either lenny, etch, hardy or dapper. You need the second line only if you want to build the packages yourself.
2. Then update apt's list of repository metadata:

   apt-get update
   

3. Finally you are ready to install the packages. You can choose between several flavours:
   • me-jasspa is the most common version including X support.
   • me-jasspa-nox is a version without X support.
   • ne-jasspa contains only NanoEmacs (very small).
   You can install each of them by executing

   apt-get install <flavour>
   

Thanks to Patrick Das Gupta for debianizing MicroEmacs and providing a template for these instructions.

Extensions for the LaTeX mode

To ease LaTeX document creation with MicroEmacs I re-implemented a few features of AUCTeX. Those extensions can be found in mylatex.emf, that is executed while entering latex-mode if it is found in the personal macro directory (.e.g. $HOME/.jasspa). This file is licensed under the GNU GPL. A decribtion of the functions and the corresponding shortcuts can be found in the file starting at line 50.

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last edited 25/3/2009,