UMBC CMSC 201 Fall '01

CMSC 201 NEWS

Announcements

.emacs
EMACS -- when emacs (or xemacs) begins, it looks for and reads a file named .emacs in your home directory to obtain configuration information. Save this .emacs file (note the leading "dot") in your Unix home directory to get the following features:

Automtic formatting in accordance with the CS201 coding style standard
A working backspace key. Backspace will now delete to the left of the cursor instead of invoking "help". It also remaps CTL-X? to be the new "help" key.

The .emacs file is publicly available in the directory

To copy the file, 'cd' to your home directory and type the command

Don't forget the dot (.) at the end... it means copy the file to the current directory.

Enjoy!

Newsgroups

There is a newsgroup for this course, which provides a open forum in which anyone can post messages of interest to the CMSC 201 community. You should learn how to read news and subscribe to the newsgroup umbc.course.csee201 While you are at it, subscribe to the umbc.csee newsgroup which carries announcements of the CSEE Department, information about the department, and computer and information technology in general. When you subscribe to these groups, spend some time looking through the titles of other newsgroups. I'm sure there are other groups that you may find interesting.

There are several newsreaders available on gl. The most commonly used are: rn, trn, xrn, pine and Netscape. Since rn, trn, and xrn were designed specifically to read news, you will find that they are more powerful than either pine or Netscape for reading and posting. Investigate some of these newsreaders so that you can choose the newsreader you prefer.

last modified on Tuesday, 04-Sep-2001 12:26:37 EDT