waiting for 22

Achilles had Patroclus. Don Quixote had Sancho Panza. Michael Jackson has Bubbles. And I have emacs. On my N810. A while ago, I already wrote about it. I even showed some screenshot of emacs running in scratchbox. But, I didn't take the final step - getting it to run on an actual N810. Recently, I tried to get that to work. Well, that was frustrating... Some hackish instructions follow. They may or may not work for you -- try at your own risk :)

• First I tried to simply rebuild the Emacs23-packages in scratchbox; that failed, because the compilation somehow crashes QEMU;
  
• Then I tried Emacs 22 instead... but the problem remained;
  
• So, I decided that maybe I should try to compile the package it on the N810 itself. Again, that failed. One of many problems: package building requires a real grep, and if you try to install it, it wants to remove the whole busybox environment; sigh. I fought the system - the system won...
  

But, all was not lost. There are prebuilt Debian packages of Emacs22 available; I took the armel-packages from there, and tried to install them. That almost worked. Almost, because the size of emacs is almost legendary. It did not fit on my root file system on the N810.

We're nearing the solution though; I copied the contents of the .debs to a directory emacs810 (with mc); then I copied this directory to the MMC-card of the N810 (/media/mmc2/). I set some symlinks, ie.

  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/emacs /usr/share/emacs
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/emacs22 /usr/share/emacs22
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/bin/emacs22-gtk /usr/bin/emacs22
  # ln -s /media/mmc2/emacs810/usr/share/applications/emacs22.desktop /usr/share/applications/hildon/

Also, you'll need to install libungif4g. That should do the trick, and emacs should show up in your Extras-menu. And we can run emacs! Victory is mine!

Well, almost. In emacs, a very useful key is the Meta-key, usually mapped to the Alt-key of your keyboard. But of course, there's no alt-key on the N810-keyboard. Instead, I decided to remap the Chr-key. I'd like to remap it in my .emacs, but I haven't been able to do so.

Anyway, as a first start, I added these to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-44 (the xkb keyboard mapping):

   key <SPCE> {  [ space, space, Tab, space ] };
   key <COMP> {  [ Meta_L, Meta_L, Multi_key, Meta_L ] };
   
   modifier_map Mod1 { Meta_L };

The first one will turn Fn-Spc into Tab, which is very useful for completion (for some reason, I couldn't get M-i working in the minibuffer). The second one will turn the Chr key into the M-key (obviously, you can't run emacs without that), with Fn-Chr giving the old Chr key. Not sure what it will break - it's black magic.

Ok, that's it. These steps should be cleaned-up, pre-packaged and made single-click-available. Anyway, the steps above should hopefully get you a working hand held emacs. Happy hacking!