Emacs weirdness at console

Joshua Oreman oremanj at webserver.get-linux.org
Mon May 19 15:54:01 PDT 2003


On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 09:18:45PM +0800 or thereabouts, Robert Storey seemed to write:
> On Mon, 19 May 2003 17:47:17 +0930
> "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Monday, 19 May 2003 at 15:34:02 +0800, Robert Storey wrote:
> > > I'm a Linux refugee, and I confess to being new at FreeBSD.
> > >
> > > I've used Emacs a lot over the past few years under Linux. What I've
> > > noticed in FreeBSD is that Emacs barely works at the console, yet it
> > > works fine under X.
> > 
> > Are you having other problems than the one you describe?
> 
> Well, now that you ask...
> 
> Is there a utility in FBSD to turn on/off num_lock? Linux has one called
> "setleds" but I don't see that in the ports collection.
> 
> I was going to ask you how to set the keyboard key rate, but your
> suggestion below to look at the man page for kbdcontrol solved that one
> for me. 
> 
> I installed "most" (from the ports collection), a much more colorful pager
> for man pages than plain old "more." I figured out that I can use "most"
> as a pager by doing this:
> 
>    man -P most <command>
> 
> The question is: how can I set "most" to be my default pager so I don't
> have to type "-P most"?

export PAGER=most
(to do it every login, add that line to your ~/.profile file)

> 
> I haven't yet found a FBSD equivalent to the Linux "Cryptoapi" program,
> which allows one to encrypt a partition. Does anything like this exist
> yet?

5.x has GBDE. There are also some ports for 4.x users.

> 
> I'm still looking for a way to share a partition (on the same hard drive)
> with Linux so I can exchange data - maybe that isn't possible. Doesn't
> seem that FreeBSD supports ext2, and Linux doesn't support UFS. As far as
> I know, the only way to exchange data is to use a second machine on the
> network.

man mount_ext2fs  [freebsd]
Linux supports ufs fs'es, but only blk sizes of 8192, 32768, ...
Since sysinstall default is 16384, it's probably better to
mount Linux under FreeBSD, instead of the other way around.

Note: you must add the line
options		EXT2FS
to your kernel config, and re-compile. See chapter 9 of the Handbook
for more details.

> 
> > > A crucial problem (in the console) is that the ALT key (or M- key in
> > > Emacs parlance) just doesn't work at all.
> > 
> > The Meta (M-) key is not the Alt key.  If you want to use the Alt key
> > as a Meta key, you need to tell the system to do so.
> 
> I stand corrected.
> 
> > > That's pretty major - without that key, about half the Emacs
> > > commands are inaccessible.
> > 
> > No, that's not correct.  Hit Esc first, then the character.  That has
> > always worked.
> 
> You're right again - except when you want to auto-repeat the command. Like
> for example, M-f, to move forward one word. I'll often hold down M-f and
> move forward 10 words or more. Trying doing that with ESC-f and it will
> drive you crazy.

C-u <number> M-f
(or)
C-u C-u C-u M-f  [that does 4x4x4 = 64 times]
C-u C-u M-f      [that does 4x4   = 16 times]

>  
> > > The CTRL key (C- ) does work as expected. Again, in X, all is well
> > > with Emacs.
> > 
> > Try loading the emacs key bindings:
> > 
> >  # kbdcontrol -l /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/us.emacs.kbd
> 
> Great, that worked like a charm.
>  
> > You can get the system to load this keymap automatically at boot time
> > by putting the following line in your /etc/rc.conf:
> > 
> >   keymap="us.emacs.kbd"   # keymap in /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/* (or
> >   NO).
> 
> This also worked wonders.
> 
> > See the man page for kbdcontrol(1) for more details.
> 
> Great, it has already proven useful!
> 
> And mucho thanks Greg for all your help!
> 
> regards,
> Robert
> 
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-- Josh


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