• Elias Martenson
• Email: [email protected]

To install, add the following to your init.el:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/path-to/gnu-apl-mode")
(require 'gnu-apl-mode)

You can then start the APL interaction using M-x gnu-apl.

This package requires certain features of GNU APL that was implemented as of version 1.2. In partciular, it takes advantage of a command line option called --emacs which enables certain features that are used by this mode. If your version of GNU APL is too old, you will get an error message saying that the --emacs flag is not understood.

This version of the mode uses a different method to communicate with the backend GNU APL instance. Instead of sending commands to the command line, it now loads native code which allows the Emacs mode to communicate using a network connection.

GNU APL ships with the native component of this mode and is installed as libemacs.so. If you are using a newer version of this Emacs mode, it may cause compatibility problems between the native module and the Emacs Lisp code. If this happens, you need to compile the module yourself (from the native directory) and install it in the lib/apl directory where GNU APL is installed.

This mode provides two different ways to input APL characters. The first is part of the mode itself, and implements the full GNU APL keymap, when the "super" key is active.

If your keyboard does not have a super key (I highly recommend that you map one, for example the otherwise useless windows key), you can also use the APL-Z mode. Simply press C-\ and choose APL-Z. This will provide the same keymap, but prefixed by ".". Pressing dot twice will output a dot on its own.

By default, the keyboard help buffer is opened whenever the GNU APL interactive mode is started. If you do not want this behaviour, set the variable gnu-apl-show-keymap-on-startup to nil. This value can be customised using M-x customize-variable.

Some operating systems (in particular, Fedora) does not ship with fonts that contain all the nescessary APL symbols. One free font that contains all symbols and also looks good is GNU Free Mono. It can be downloaded here: https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/

Usually, one wants to use a different font for APL buffers. This mode includes a face called gnu-apl-default which is used in various places, such as the help buffers. However, it's not currently enabled by default in the interactive session, nor in APL buffers.

If you want to enable this, add the following to your ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

(defun em-gnu-apl-init ()
  (setq buffer-face-mode-face 'gnu-apl-default)
  (buffer-face-mode))

(add-hook 'gnu-apl-interactive-mode-hook 'em-gnu-apl-init)
(add-hook 'gnu-apl-mode-hook 'em-gnu-apl-init)

This enables buffer-face-mode with the chosen font when an APL buffer is opened.

This may be changed to be the default in a future version.