26.14 Emulation

SXEmacs can be programmed to emulate (more or less) most other editors. Standard facilities can emulate these:

Viper (a vi emulator)

In SXEmacs, Viper is the preferred emulation of vi within SXEmacs. Viper is designed to allow you to take advantage of the best features of SXEmacs while still doing your basic editing in a familiar, vi-like fashion. Viper provides various different levels of vi emulation, from a quite complete emulation that allows almost no access to native SXEmacs commands, to an “expert” mode that combines the most useful vi commands with the most useful SXEmacs commands.

To start Viper, put the command

(viper-mode)

in your init file. See Init File.

Viper comes with a separate manual that is provided standard with the SXEmacs distribution.

EDT (DEC VMS editor)

Turn on EDT emulation with M-x edt-emulation-on. M-x
edt-emulation-off restores normal Emacs command bindings.

Most of the EDT emulation commands are keypad keys, and most standard Emacs key bindings are still available. The EDT emulation rebindings are done in the global keymap, so there is no problem switching buffers or major modes while in EDT emulation.

Gosling Emacs

Turn on emulation of Gosling Emacs (aka Unipress Emacs) with M-x set-gosmacs-bindings. This redefines many keys, mostly on the C-x and ESC prefixes, to work as they do in Gosmacs. M-x set-gnu-bindings returns to normal SXEmacs by rebinding the same keys to the definitions they had at the time M-x set-gosmacs-bindings was done.

It is also possible to run Mocklisp code written for Gosling Emacs. See Mocklisp.