Re: Several beginner-questions

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2011 23:22:31 +0100
> 
> 1) Is there a package to recreate the old MS-DOS pull-down menu display, 
> instead of the default "open new buffer to display menu items" behavior 
> (invoked by F10)?

I don't think so.  Someone(TM) should back-port the DOS code that
supports menus of a text-only terminal to the rest of Emacs platforms.

> 2) I have set (line-number-mode 1) and (column-number-mode 1) in order to see 
> the cursor coordinates, and this works. However, column numbering begins with 
> zero --- the top-left corner of the buffer has coordinates (1,0). How do I 
> get 
> rid of the 0-th column? I want the columns to be counted from 1 (so that the 
> corner has coordinates (1,1), which is more natural from my POV)?

You could redefine mode-line-format to do that, but it will need a bit
of Lisp programming.

> 3) When I do a M-x list-colors-display, emacs displays all 256 colors 
> properly, but with wrong names. Instead of giving the colors names as per the 
> rgb.txt file, it lists names like color-16, color-17, etc. Those names are 
> not 
> recognized in the .emacs (while rgb.txt names are). How do I make it use 
> color 
> names from the rgb.txt file, when invoking list-colors-display?

See tty-colors.el for the infrastructure and term/xterm.el for an
example of using it.  Actually, since you seem to be using a 256-color
xterm, Emacs should have done this automatically for you.  Perhaps you
have an old version of Emacs, in which case upgrade.

> 4) I'd like to use the TAB key to type four SPC characters in the buffer when 
> I 
> press it. However, I don't want to disturb its auto-completion functionality 
> when doing anything other than just typing text in the buffer. What is the 
> "safest" way to create a keybinding for this?

See indent-tabs-mode and tab-width.

> [vmarko@Yoda ~]$ emacs -nw --version
> GNU Emacs 23.2.1

Suggest to upgrade to Emacs 23.3, the latest official release.