To get UTF-8 to work when sending drafted messages in Wanderlust with Emacs 23.1 I had to apply this patch to FLIM.

I also checked out the wl-2_15_6-vtl branch in the wanderlust repository and the semi-1_14-vtl branch in the semi repository. (See repos for info about the repositories.)

Someone once said something along the lines that to those in the Western world who don't speak Japanese there is an alternate universe of FOSS [1] development in Japan [#china], and every so often things from that universe just appear in the Western FOSS universe as mysterious foreign objects. Ruby seems to have made a solid connection between the universes, but many others less approachable.

Wanderlust development and the development of the emacs packages that it depends on (APEL, FLIM, and SEMI) feel like that to me. Some of them have web pages, but they're usually quite out of date. It can be difficult to their CVS repositories, and even more difficult to find the browse-able web interfaces to their CVS repositories. Every time I want to look at the code, I have to figure this all out again, hence this post.

There was a post on the Wanderlust English-language mailing list from Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org> on Wednesday, 27 May 2009 that gave the location of the APEL, FLIM, and SEMI cvs repositories, and mentioned that development in the FLIM and SEMI repositories was taking place under the flim_1_14 and semi_1_14 branches, respectively. The post also said that the place for discussion about APEL is the APEL mailing lists:

apel-en@m17n.org

apel-ja@m17n.org

To subscribe, send an empty e-mail to apel-en-ctl@m17n.org and/or apel-ja-ctl@m17n.org.

The place to discuss FLIM and SEMI is the EMACS-MIME mailing list:

emacs-mime-en@m17n.org

emacs-mime-ja@m17n.org

To subscribe, send an e-mail containing “subscribe YOUR NAME” in its contents to emacs-mime-en-ctl@m17n.org and/or emacs-mime-ja-ctl@m17n.org.

So, here are the CVS commands I just used to check the various packages out:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.m17n.org:/cvs/root checkout wanderlust
cvs -z9 -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.m17n.org:/cvs/root checkout apel
cvs -z9 -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.m17n.org:/cvs/root checkout -r flim-1_14 flim
cvs -z9 -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.m17n.org:/cvs/root checkout -r semi-1_14 semi

Here are the browse-able CVS web interfaces:

• http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/wanderlust/
• http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/apel/
• http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/flim/
• http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/semi/

If you happen to be using Windows Emacs and Cygwin Python there's an annoying interaction where “M-x run-python” hangs. The easiest way to fix it is to mount the directory where you have your emacs installation into the Cygwin file name structure. For instance, I have my emacs installation in C:\emacs\emacs-22.2, and in a cygwin shell I did mount -b ‘C:\emacs' /emacs, and now running the Cygwin python works.

The emacs function run-python adds the emacs data-directory to the PYTHONPATH in the emacs process-environment before running python; unfortunately, since this is the MS Windows emacs, its data-directory starts with a drive letter and a colon. When the Cygwin python initializes sys.path it splits PYTHONPATH at the colons, which means sys.path ends up with the drive letter as one component (usually interpreted as a relative path) and everything after the colon as another component. It that's a valid Cygwin pathname for the Emacs data directory (which is what the above mount command did), things work (accidentally).

It turns out that if you execute the command xterm-mouse-mode (or evaluate (xterm-mouse-mode 1) in your initialization file) when running Emacs under Screen it allows “non-modified single clicks” to work. Normal mouse functionality is still available by holding the Shift key while clicking. I use the PuTTY ssh client for remote access to various servers, and this works well Emacs in Screen under PuTTY, too.

I found a very useful Emacs minor mode today: linum.el, which puts line numbers at the beginning of all the lines in a buffer.