3.2.4 Customization of the Emacs interface

Emacs provides a convenient interface to customize the behavior of Emacs and the SINGULAR Emacs interface for your own needs. You enter the customize environment by either calling M-x customize (on XEmacs you afterwards have to enter emacs in the minibuffer area) or by selecting the menu item Options->Customize->Emacs... for XEmacs, and the menu item Help->Customize->Toplevel Customization Group for Emacs, resp. A brief introduction to the customization mode comes up with the customization buffer. All customizable parameters are hierarchically grouped and you can browse through all these groups and change the values of the parameters using the mouse. At the end you can safe your settings to a file making your changes permanent.

To change the settings of the SINGULAR Emacs interface you can either select the item Preferences of the Singular menu, call M-x customize-group and give the argument singular-interactive in the minibuffer area, or browse from the top-level customization group through the path External->Singular->Singular interactive.

The SINGULAR interface customization buffer is divided into four groups:

• Singular Faces

  Here you can specify various faces used if font-lock-mode is enabled (which, by default, is).

• Singular Sections And Foldings

  Here you can specify special faces for SINGULAR input and output and change the text used as replacement for folded sections.

  For doing this, you also might find handy the function customize-face-at-point, which lets you customize the face at the current position of point. This function is automatically defined if you run ESingular). Otherwise, you should add its definition (see below) to your personal .emacs file.

• Singular Interactive Miscellaneous

  Here you can specify various things such as the behavior of the cursor keys, the name of the special SINGULAR startup file, the appearance of the help window, or the default values for the singular command.

• Singular Demo Mode

  Here you can specify how chunks of the demo file are divided, or specify a default directory for demo files.

When you run ESingular, the settings of customized variables are saved in the file $HOME/.emacs-singular-cust. Otherwise, the settings are appended to your .emacs file. Among others, this means that the customized settings of ESingular are not automatically taken over by a "normal" Emacs, and vice versa.