I am an avid user of XEmacs and have recently started using it for my LaTeX editing as well after getting fed up with a few limitations of my old editor. I ran into a bug in it however that can halt usage of it rather quickly which occurs when you already have one .tex file open and try to open another file.

If you attempt this with some versions of XEmacs the open file dialog will not appear and you will see the following error:

window height 0 too small (after splitting)

There is a workaround for this bug (which hopefully will be fixed in an upcoming XEmacs release).

First you have to locate the file minibuf.elc. In Ubuntu 10.10 (with XEmacs version 21.4.22) this file is located in :

/usr/share/xemacs-21.4.22/lisp/minibuf.elc

Open this file and within it you need to search for the following string:

split-window frame-height 3

Replace the 3 in that line with a 5. After this open your init.el file. This is usually in ~/.xemacs – In this file add the following line:

(load-library "minibuf.elc")

Et Voila! After you have done all this you should be able to get the open file dialog to appear.

I recently had a look around for a nice way to create tables for use in a latex using some sort of WYSIWYG editor and came across this elisp package for xemacs.

Having never used an elisp package before I did a bit of searching around and it proved to be a bit tricker to find how to install it thatn I thought it would be. Anyway, here are the simple steps needed to get one running.

First of all create a directory somewhere for your elisp files to reside in, I chose ~/elisp. Then open your xemacs slisp config file, for me this was located in ~/.xemacs/custom.el – Then add the following lines to it :

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp")
(require 'table)

In the second line, ‘table’ refers to the elisp file excluding the ‘.el’ file extension, so ‘table.el’ in this case. Simples…