Simple Customisation

The best way to tailor the editor to your own requirements is with your personal startup file. This is called `.jaderc' in your home directory (7), it is a file of Lisp forms evaluated when Jade initialises itself.

Usually, setting the values of variables in your startup file is enough to configure Jade how you want, the Lisp function to set a variable is called setq, it's first argument is the name of the variable, it's second the value you wish to set it to. This value will usually be one of the following data types,

"xyz"

A string `xyz'.

123

0173

0x7b

A number, all of the above have the value 123 (in decimal, octal and hexadecimal).

nil

t

A boolean value, nil means false, or not true. t is the opposite (in fact, any value not nil is true).

My `.jaderc' file looks something like this (note that semicolons introduce comments),

;;;; .jaderc -*-Lisp-*-

;; Size of tabs for Lisp source is 2
(setq lisp-body-indent 2)

;; When on an Amiga, flag that I don't want pull down menus
(when (amiga-p)
  (setq amiga-no-menus t))

;; When editing English-text use auto-filling
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'fill-mode-on)

;; -with a maximum of 74 characters in a line
(setq fill-column 74)

;; Start the edit server
(server-open)

Most simple customisations can be achieved by simply giving a variable a new value. Use the setq special form to do this (a special form is a type of function) as in the examples above. If you wish to set variables interactively use the set command:

Meta-x set RET variable-name RET new-value RET.

The add-hook function adds a function (in this case fill-mode-on) to be called when the specified hook (in this case text-mode-hook) is evaluated. The single-quote before the names means that the names are passed as constants; not their values. If you don't quite understand what I'm talking about don't worry.

For full documentation of Jade's programming language see section Programming Jade.

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