Customizing both emacsen is a pain. If you take care when writing your InitFile, then it will work in both of them. Naturally, compiling the file will produce incompatible byte code, so don’t do that.
Recently, XEmacs offers to migrate your .emacs file to a .xemacs file. If you do that, however, a lot of code will be duplicated, unless you load the common stuff from both .emacs and .xemacs again. Thus it depends on what you find easier to maintain.
Many people suggest you take care writing one .emacs. Here is how it might work:
Use (featurep 'xemacs) to conditionalize code when the interface or the notation has changed. This is rarely needed.
(if (featurep 'xemacs)
(blabla for xemacs)
(blibli for emacs))You can also use the ‘window-system’ variable, but that was never intended as a user level variable, so try to avoid it:
(when (eq window-system 'x)
(color-theme-robin-hood))This is better written using ‘display-color-cells’:
(when (> (display-color-cells) 16)
(color-theme-robin-hood))(emacs-version), ‘emacs-major-version’, ‘emacs-minor-version’(system-name)system-typesystem-configuration; a string giving the OS and other info(getenv "TERM")If all you need is a certain function, it’s better to test if that specific function is avalible, using fboundp:
(if (fboundp 'auto-compression-mode)
(auto-compression-mode 1))A useful function to achieve the same thing is this one (based on a function from AaronL’s InitFile):
(defun call-if-fbound (function &rest args)
"Call FUNCTION with optional ARGS, only if it is fbound.
Return t if it is fbound and called without error, and nil otherwise."
(when (fboundp function)
(apply function args)
t))Since it returns t if and only if the function did exist, you can use it quite nicely like this:
(or (call-if-fbound 'iswitchb-mode 1)
(call-if-fbound 'iswitchb-default-keybindings)) ; the old wayWhen setting variables that only exist in some version of Emacs, don’t be afraid to always set them: they will just be ignored in the versions where they don’t exist.
Using custom in both emacsen is confusing. I suggest you only use custom in one of them, eg. Emacs, and disable the saving of customizations in the other (to prevent it from mangling your hand-crafted InitFile). Here is how:
;; When using XEmacs, disable all customizations (when (featurep 'xemacs) (load-library "cus-edit") (mapc (lambda (s) (when (and (functionp s) (string-match "^custom" (symbol-name s))) (fset s (lambda (&rest ignore) (error "The saving of customizations was undefined"))))) '(custom-save-all customize-save-customized customize-save-variable)))
Another strategy for dealing with custom is to have different values of ‘custom-file’ depending on the Emacsen. Something like this should do:
(setq custom-file
(expand-file-name (concat "~/."
(if (featurep 'xemacs)
"x"
"")
"emacs-custom.el")))
(load custom-file t)StephenTurnbull said that XEmacs will load custom-file during startup anyway. It seems that loading custom-file is only necessary for Emacs. In fact, Emacs 21.3.50 (HEAD from CVS) will load custom-file during startup if it isn’t manually loaded already.
Yet another strategy is to use various shell scripts and environment variables. Perhaps the simplest thing to do is to always call emacs from a script (or “batch file” on windows): have the script set some environment variable, and then have your InitFile test that variable using the function ‘getvar’.
Example: On windows you could have one shortcut called “Cygwinized Emacs” call a batch file similar to this one:
@echo off
rem Set vars for Emacs
set PLATFORM=cygwin
set HOME=t:\tlroche rem Use bash to start X
cd /d D:\bin\cygwin\1.3.13-1\bin
bash --login -c "startx"
rem emacs gets called by my .xinitrc rem unset vars
set HOME=
set PLATFORM=And for NT Emacs, use a batch file similar to this one:
@echo off
set PLATFORM=native
F:\tlroche\emacs-21.1\bin\runemacs.exe
set PLATFORM=Then, in your InitFile, do a test like
(defvar platform (getenv "PLATFORM"))
(when (string-match "native" platform)
; do what you need to do, e.g. setq load-path
)
(when (string-match "cygwin" platform)
...
)There was a bug in XEmacs 21.4.6 which ignored my custom-file setting and erased my custom-set-variables statement in my InitFile. The bug only manifests itself when this is the first time you start XEmacs, have not migrated your InitFile, and have an error in your InitFile. I had an error in my InitFile because it had changed so much and I use XEmacs only seldomly. Thus did the bug strike: Because of the error in my InitFile, my customizations where not loaded, ‘custom-file’ was not set, and then XEmacs saved the “does not want to migrate .emacs” setting as a customization and thus replaced the customizations that where in place.
‘custom-set-variables’ in your InitFile if custom-file /= .emacs? Not that there’s any excuse for the bug, but still. I don’t get it.That was just a trick to prevent me from ever saving customizations in XEmacs. If I ever did that, the settings should be saved into another file. When running Emacs, ‘custom-file’ was not changed and thus defaulted to .emacs.
I swiped this idea from somewhere - sorry for not keeping track of who gave it to me. I have three subdirectories: ~/.gemacs, ~/.xemacs, and ~/emacs-common There is an init.el file in each. My .emacs looks like:
;;; XEmacs backwards compatibility file
(if (string-match "XEmacs" emacs-version)
(setq thesub ".xemacs")
(setq thesub ".gemacs")) (setq user-init-file
(expand-file-name "init.el"
(expand-file-name thesub "~")))
(setq custom-file
(expand-file-name "custom.el"
(expand-file-name thesub "~"))) (load-file user-init-file)
(load-file custom-file)
(my-color-theme)