Jasspa MicroEmacs Text Editor

MicroEmacs text editor is an Emacs like text editor suitable for experienced programmers and as well beginners.

In contrast to other editors it offers a set of unique features:

• small size 1-2MB on your harddisk
• single file binaries - easy to install
• low memory footprint - 1-2 Mb in principle
• terminal and GUI version working the same way with full menu support
• hypertext help system within your editor
• alternative keybindings

As other editors it has obviously:

• session management (pro: parallel sessions for every project - due to low memory footprint are no problem)
• extensible by a macro language (as well a macro recorder)
• syntax highlighting for many languages - even nested highlighting (R, Python etc in Markdown documents )
• spell checking for many languages
• and much more ...

Cons (because it is a Micro-Emacs):

• no Unicode support - but all the ISO and extended Windows encodings are usable even on UTF-8 terminals
• no soft (visual) wrap - what you see is what you get (you can let ME autowrap for you the text during writing)

  

Left: GUI version - theme "Basic Black on Cream", Right: Greek Text in the Terminal version within a Tmux session with an open menu entry - theme: "Default White on Black". The menu entry can be opened on a terminal version usually with "Esc =". There are more than 25 themes (schemes) to choose from ... The main appplication frame is split here into two windows, one is for editing a file, the other here has the hyperhelp documentation open. You can as well edit the same file within several separate windows, for instance writing something on top, and then in the other windows more down in the same file ... but obviously editing one file in a single window is as well possible.

  

Left: GUI version - theme "Solarized Light", displaying on top a help page defined using Markdown (bottom window) for the pydoc macro,
Right: GUI version - theme "Ayu Dark", displaying the hypertext enabled R documentation browser defined with the r-doc command.

Installation

You can compile the code yourself, or you pick one or two of the precompiled ones from the Release page.

MicroEmacs single file executables comes in two flavors:

• mecs - terminal version
• mews - GUI version (require X11 on Linux and MacOS)

Download one of the following zip archives with the binaries inside and place the executables into a folder belonging to your PATH

Platform	Terminal	GUI (X11 on Linux/Mac)
Linux	mecs	mews
MacOS apple	mecs	mews
MacOS intel	mecs	mews
Windows	mecs	mews

To test the integrity of the downloads you can use the sha256 hash keys.

Then test the executable in your terminal:

mecs -V

This should printout the version and exit MicroEmacs.

User Setup

After starting your first real session you are proposed to do call the init-session function if you like to save your settings on the current system. You can do this by calling the init-session function. Press Esc and then the x key, you see that you are in the command line at the bottom can write some text, write init-session press ENTER.

Then you should select your keyboard layout. Either you use the menubar on top to find that functionality "Esc =" should work in the terminal and in the GUI application, the latter can use as well mouse or "Alt-t" key and then u combination, or you enter the command Esc x user-setup. In the Menu you have to access the "(T)ools - (U)ser Setup" entry.

In User setup select in the "Start-Up" tab your keyboard layout and in GUI mode in the "Platform" tab your font. X11 users here will greatly benefit if they installed the xfontsel tool as it allows to visually select the font on a MacOS or Linux system.

If you are ready use "File-Save All" to save your settings. The next ME session should start with these saved settings.

Tools to improve your editing on Linux and MacOS

• Terminal (macOS, Linux):
  • luit - run MicroEmacs with extendd character sets on UTF-8 terminals
  • abduco - suspend a luit session
• X11 (macOS, Linux):
  • xfontsel - to interactively select fonts from within your ME session
  • mkfontscale - if you like to add your own TTF fonts as available fonts

Here as an example a bash script mecu which runs a MicroEmacs on UTF-8 terminal using the Western European ISO-encodings:

#!/bin/sh
### file: mecu 
### Description: wrapper to run MicroEmacs with extended character settings
###              on UTF-8 enabled terminals
###  
### Tools required:
###   abduco: session management and detacher
###           https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/abduco/   
###   luit:   filter between non-utf-8 applications and utf-8 terminals
###           https://invisible-island.net/luit/
### Installation:
###           fedora: sudo dnf install abduco luit  
###           debian: sudo apt install abduco luit

### session name creation for the current tty 
tty=$(tty | grep -Eo '[0-9]+')
## already running? list abduco sessions
res=$(abduco -l | grep mec$tty)

### running session, if no create an new one
### otherwise attach to the old one
### (press in ME Ctrl-l to update screen if neccesary)

if [[ "$res" == "" ]] ; then 
    ### need a new one 
   TERM=xterm abduco -A -e ^z mec$tty luit -encoding ISO-8859-15 mecs "$@"
else
    ### attach to the old one
    abduco -a -e ^z mec$tty 
fi

Change the filename mecs to the name you give you MicroEmacs terminal instance. Name the file mecu, Make it executable and move to a folder belonging to your PATH variable. With this little shell script using two small tools, you can run MicroEmacs nicely as well on all UTF-8 terminals with a more extended character set.

License

GPL - see the file COPYING.txt

Authors

• Dave Conroy 1985-1986
• Daniel M. Lawrence 1986-1988
• John Green 1990-2010
• Steven Phillips 1990-2024
• Detlef Groth 2021-2024