Snapshots: Awk-mode for Emacs/XEmacs

Awk is, perhaps, the lightest programming language. However, light-weight as it is, it's very gentle and powerful. Despite lots of popular programming languages available, I take awk as a DAILY tool and like it the best. In fact, it is its smallnest that makes it possible to add not so huge a menu to provide almost all the essential parts of the language. Now, you can take Emacs/Xemacs as an awk-specific integrated development environment (IDE).

Before you can enjoy the benefits this work can bring to you, you might need to make sure that

1. GNU awk, gawk, has been installed in your system and its path is covered by the environment variable, PATH.

   If you have certain version of awk rather than gawk, please rename it as gawk (in MS Windows, gawk.exe).

2. you had better have file, gawk.info. If you click Awk | Browse Awk Manual with Info and no corresponding buffer appears, you need to set variable, Info-default-directory-list, in your initialization file, .emacs, which is in your home directory, by adding statement like

   (setq Info-default-directory-list (cons "C:/cygwin/usr/info" Info-default-directory-list))

A new menu, Awk, appears.

Submenus are helpful when you forget trivial but essential things, such as, built-in functions and variables.

Click Awk | Run Awk... to run your awk script and obtain the result or error messages in the *Shell Command Output* window. It's easy for you to program, debug and execute awk code.