Thomas Becker's Free Software Utilities
 
 

PC Mode: Emulating Some Nice Things about Windows-Based Editors in GNU Emacs

There are some features commonly found on MS-Windows-based editors that some people find desirable to have. For example, the action of the shift-arrow keys and the control-tab combination in MS-Windows-based editors is rather convenient. Also, the behavior of the cursor when scrolling in an MS-Windows-based editor is quite intuitive. PC Mode emulates some of these features in GNU Emacs.

PC mode is not the only package that emulates aspects of MS-Windows-based editors in GNU Emacs. There are other packages out there that do similar things. Most notably, there is pc-bindings-mode and pc-selection-mode. What my PC mode offers is a certain unique combination of features which I personally think are most desirable. Specifically, I am not aware of any other GNU Emacs package that offers my cursor behavior when scrolling, or my MS Visual Studio 8 style quick buffer selection via control-tab. Moreover, PC mode is customizable to a certain degree. For more information, see the documentation of PC mode.

Using PC mode also makes it easy for users of Microsoft products such as Microsoft Visual Studio to switch to GNU Emacs. With PC mode turned on, every Microsoft user can start using GNU Emacs without having to study any documentation.

PC mode comes with Emacs Lisp source code, byte-compiled code, and the documentation in HTML format.

Download PC mode

 
Version Information: I am using PC Mode with GNU Emacs 22. If you are running a more recent version of GNU Emacs, you're on your own. Since backward compatibility is not a feature of GNU Emacs, PC Mode may or may not work. If you are running GNU Emacs Version 21, you will have to install an earlier version of PC Mode. This earlier version can be found in a subdirectory named emacs21 in the distribution.