Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Tramp with XEmacs

As I mentioned in a previous entry, Tramp is a really nice emacs package for editing remote files. On my PowerBook laptop it works out-of-the-box with the carbonized GNU Emacs on MacOS X Jaguar, there is no need to install anything.

One thing I discovered while trying to use tramp at work on XEmacs 21.4.12/Linux is that tramp version 2.0.22 shipped with XEmacs has compatibility issues with efs, another Emacs package. To fix the problem I had to grab the latest tramp package and install it in my local ~/emacs directory.

One confusing bit was how to access the CVS repository. Following the instructions from Tramp's manual does not work because Savannah's CVS repository is no longer accessible using anonymous CVS. To access the CVS, you have to follow the instructions on Tramp's Savannah CVS page instead.

With this new version, Tramp uses now a different syntax to access remote files:

• /[machine].emacs or /[machine]~/.emacs - to open the ~/.emacs file on the remote machine.
• /[machine]/full/path/name/to/file - to open a file using its full path name

Assuming you downloaded tramp in the ~/emacs/tramp directory, you need to configure and compile the tramp files:

$ autoconf
$ ./configure --with-xemacs
$ make
$ make info

After this add the following to your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/tramp/list")
(add-to-list 'Info-directory-list "~/emacs/tramp/info")
(setq tramp-default-method "ssh")
(require 'tramp)