The ugly truth of how I "accomplish" things in XEmacs.

This is something I wrote up as kind of a stack trace of how I try to solve problems related to XEmacs configuration. My objective in doing this is to try and identify where I'm wasting cycles. I hope to both improve my own productivity, and to figure out better ways of helping others avoid the same pits I've fallen into. If it seems as if I'm rambling aimlessly in the following discussion, you understand it perfectly. It's item 16 of: http://66.92.149.252/open-source/org/xemacs/cpx/ch04.html Finding configuration options (quickly). For example, I am trying to set the modeline display. M-x customize-apropos RET modeline didn't seem to find that customization setting. The way I found the variable modeline-format was by C-h v frame-title-format. I got frame-title-format from my ~/.xemacs/custom.el which is based on an ancient ~/.xemacs/custom.el which I've been lugging around with me for years. I believe I got the original idea of how to do this from an example in one of the XEmacs documents. The example itself, IIRC, didn't work, but I was able to adjust it so that it did. Now, the whole reason I wanted to modify the modeline was so that the minor mode fields would not get truncated when the frame is normal size. I wanted to find out if auto-fill mode was activated. After looking over the value of modeline-format I decided it might be a bad idea to start playing with it. So plan 'B' is to right click on the little bit of the minor mode display that I can read. … Well, it's not set. Now, how do I get auto-fill mode activated by default? I now have '(enabled-behavior-list '(filladapt)) in my ~/.xemacs/custom.el. I got this from playng with the Options menu. It doesn't seem to do anything in XML mode. Now I selected auto-fill from the right-click popup on the minor mode text of the modeline. This actually seems to work. I did Options -> Save Options to Init File, but that didn't seem to do anything to the ~/.xemacs/custom.el or the ~/.xemacs/init.el Perhaps I can add something to my (require 'psgml) (defun my-xml-mode-hook () (setq sgml-indent-data t)) (add-hook 'xml-mode-hook 'my-xml-mode-hook) in the ~/.xemacs/init.el. This seems to work for setting the sgml-indent-data.C-h v auto-fill TAB doesn't seem to find an auto-fill-mode variable. Perhaps I need to invoke a function here, instead of setting a variable. Hmmm…, I'm not sure how to do that. I started to lear Lisp, but while I was trying to take notes, I realized that not having auto-fill-mode activated by default, was really anoying, so I tried to figure out how to set it to auto activate in the init files. -- STH