12 Emacs and Gforth

Gforth comes with gforth.el, an improved version of forth.el by Goran Rydqvist (included in the TILE package). The improvements are:

• A better handling of indentation.
• A custom hilighting engine for Forth-code.
• Comment paragraph filling (M-q)
• Commenting (C-x \) and uncommenting (C-u C-x \) of regions
• Removal of debugging tracers (C-x ~, see Debugging).
• Support of the info-lookup feature for looking up the documentation of a word.
• Support for reading and writing blocks files.

To get a basic description of these features, enter Forth mode and type C-h m.

In addition, Gforth supports Emacs quite well: The source code locations given in error messages, debugging output (from ~~) and failed assertion messages are in the right format for Emacs' compilation mode (see Running Compilations under Emacs) so the source location corresponding to an error or other message is only a few keystrokes away (C-x ` for the next error, C-c C-c for the error under the cursor).

Moreover, for words documented in this manual, you can look up the glossary entry quickly by using C-h TAB (info-lookup-symbol, see Documentation Commands). This feature requires Emacs 20.3 or later and does not work for words containing :.

• Installing gforth.el: Making Emacs aware of Forth.
• Emacs Tags: Viewing the source of a word in Emacs.
• Hilighting: Making Forth code look prettier.
• Auto-Indentation: Customizing auto-indentation.
• Blocks Files: Reading and writing blocks files.