Re: -q error

["Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Ring writes:
 > Hello Tim,
 > 
 > When I go to the customize emacs group - the one that "finds a
 > suitable browser" - all I see is mention of Windows anc Cywin and DOS
 > - I got the emacspeak file from Debian Linux.

Not sure what your referring to here. To change the default web browser, you
need to do

M-x customize-group <ret> browse-url <ret>

which should bring up the customize buffer for customizing the browse-url
package. This is the package that controls what browser is selected when you
attempt to follow links etc. Of course, you won't be able to do this until you
fix your other problem. 

 > 
 > That also confuses me!
 > 
 > I went and found the emacspeak executable in /usr/bin/ or in
 > /usr/local/bin - I forget which and ran it by using ./emacspeak and I
 > still got the notice that I was using the -q option and thus could not
 > save any customization.
 > 

Yes, its that executable 'emacspeak', which is simply a shell wrapper script
that calls emacs and instructs it to load emacspeak as part of the command
arguments passed to emacs. This is just one way of running emacs and
emacspeak. It is a convenience script provided in the package, but it has the
unfortunate side-effect of preventing you from editing settings using
customize. How you start emacs and emacspeak is really down to personal taste.
I would not use the 'emacspeak' shell script. Instead, I use the elisp file I
sent in my previous post. This file is loaded by emacs when it starts. I do't
use any wrapper script. All I do is type emacs and the prompt and emacspeak is
loaded as part of the startup process because that file I included in my
previous post is in the load path and is executed when emacs starts. 

Assuming you have a working installation of emacspeak (i.e. compiled with
working speech server etc). The only thing that is required for emacs to use
emacspeak is for emacs to be able to find the emacspeak lisp files and to 
load emacspeak-setup.el. You can just put this information at the top of your
.emacs file and then just run emacs, or you can create a startup-lisp file
such as the example I sent before and put it in one of the site-start.d
directories as I outlined in the previous post. 

Personally, I think everyone is better off not using the packaged versions of
emacspeak. My apologies to package maintainers as this is not meant to reflect
negatively on the good work they do in making these packages. However, I think
the packages are unnecessary because emacspeak is very easy to install from
sources and because the package approach tends to result in users not really
getting to  udnerstand how it all fits together and can also result in
unfortunate side effects, such as the -q and customize problem.   With two
releases of emacspeak a year, the package versions also tend to fall behind. 

David, my advice is don't start emacspeak wiht any command called emacspeak or
emacspeak.sh or anything else. Read the docs and find out how to add what is
needed to .emacs or put it in a site-start file and then just run emacs from
the command line. While a bit more wowrk, you will understand how it fits
together a bit better and you will get past the -q problem, allowing you to
use customize to configure things.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross
tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.
-- 
Tim Cross
tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.

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