1 Prerequisites

This is a quick guided tour through the main features of Shemacs. It assumes you have already installed Shemacs following the instructions from the provided INSTALLATION file. Unless otherwise specified, an instruction to select a menu item refers to a menu item under the Shemacs menu.

2 Bring up 3 XEmacs processes

Start three XEmacs processes:

xemacs &; xemacs &; xemacs &

After all three XEmacs processes have come up, lay them out on your screen such that all three of them are visible as in figure 1.

3 Bring Up a Shemacs Server

Shemacs is a client-server system. A Shemacs server is sometimes referred to as a sherver. In this demo, we started three XEmacs processes because we will start a sherver on one of them and a client on each of the remaining two.

You need to start a sherver because it will hold the list of documents that you want to make available for shared editing with others, but most importantly, the sherver will perform concurrency control on the changes performed by users simultaneously editing a sherver-shared document. Let's start a sherver on the first XEmacs process. Hereafter, we wil refer to this XEmacs process as the sherver. To start the server, enter

M-x shm*cmd*start-sherver

You will now be asked a series of questions at the minibuffer. Here are the questions you will be asked along with the answers you should provide:

Step Prompt Your Response 1 host name: (press return for default) 2 port number: (press return for default) 3 directory for this sherver: ?/shemacs-demo 4 Is this a brand new sherver? yes
5 Building clients.hb: password for Gagent? kalanianaole 6 Building clients.hb: user and password (if no more, type "exit")? steve kaaawa 7 Building clients.hb: user and password (if no more, type "exit")? dano malaekahana 8 Building clients.hb: user and password (if no more, type "exit")? exit
9 Enter HBS password (db-ID: host.domain.15000, client: Gagent): kalanianaole

It is encouraged that you choose a password of your own in steps 5 through 7 and to substitute them in these instructions as needed. This is to prevent other people reading this demo to access your sherver with the sample passwords used in here.
The sherver is identified by a db-ID which is normally your host's fully qualified domain name followed by a period and the port number used.