From:	ANTHONY APPLEYARD <A DOT APPLEYARD AT fs1 DOT mt DOT umist DOT ac DOT uk>
To:	DJGPP AT SUN DOT SOE DOT CLARKSON DOT EDU
Date:	Thu, 1 Dec 1994 08:48:31 GMT
Subject:	Re: Preprocessor information

  Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp> wrote on Thu 1 Dec 1994
10:44:26 +0900 (Subject: Preprocessor information):-

  > ... it uses bandwidth (not a big deal IMHO; those who disagree, have you
looked at alt.binaries recently?)
  (a) Sorry.
  (b) What and where is alt.binaries? What is on it?

  > Actually, [editing a program and looking at online help at the same time]
is extremely easy. Just use *macs. ... they all ... [and] modern editors will
do multiple buffers/multiple windows.

  So will the emacs that I use, which is AAEMACS that I wrote myself in Gnu
C++. If the help is on a plain text file, OK, I can enter AAEMACS and e.g.
bind key F1 to the program and F2 to the previous compilation's error output
and F3 to a help file (and pressing each of those keys switches to the buffer
that it is bound to), and I often did that with the long DOCS\INFO ascii help
file that I wrote amd it was part of the djgpp system for a long time until
someone wrote the present TeX-ish INFO system. But I can't do that with the
present DJGPP\DOCS\GCC\GCC.TEX file, because (a) it suffers from the usual
illegibilities of trying to read .TEX matter directly by eye as text, (b) much
important matter is missing from it but instead is on six large @include files
(TEX equivalent of #include), (c) if I make my own copy with the @include'd
files copied in, the result would occupy much filestore and be so big that it
would take ages for my emacs to read it into a buffer each time.

  > Most modern editors at least permit you to push to DOS.
  So can mine, but it takes time to swop in and out of it (if whatever text
editor I am using doesn't merely say to me e.g. "I can't, I ain't got the RAM
room in 'ere to run yer 'elp 'andling program on top o' my own work"), and in
that time I forget what I was looking for, or have to scribble it on bits of
paper. So I need the help on a plain ascii file.

  > DESQview and DESQview/X, of course, will allow multiple copies of editors,
Info viewers, and anything else you like to run simultaneously.
  What are these? Where to get them? How much file space and RAM do they use?

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