Xemacs

By default, the text editor Emacs is installed on the servers that you can SSH to. However, you might prefer to use XEmacs, which isn't installed. To resolve the issue, you simply need to install it in your home directory. Here are some high-level notes on how to install XEmacs in your homedir.

Download
First things first, you need to download the latest version. There are a variety of mirrors available from where to download the software, which at the time of writing are listed at http://www.xemacs.org/Download/. You almost certainly want to download the latest stable version of XEmacs, unless you like pain. So, download that file to your hosting account by using wget. Here, I chose the Norwegian mirror to download the package, and downloaded the bz2 one, which is compressed into a smaller filesize that the gzipped version:

wget ftp://ftp.uninett.no/pub/xemacs/stable/xemacs-21.4.20.tar.bz2

Configure and install
Since you won't have root on your server, you need to install it in your home directory. This isn't a problem, as it isn't that big. The following is what I did, and it all worked without any problems:

tar jxf xemacs-21.4.20.tar.bz2 cd xemacs-21.4.20 ./configure --prefix=/home/mkns/installs/ --with-prefix=yes --with-x11=no make make install

Note: the value of the --prefix option points to a directory in my home directory (/home/mkns) which you'll clearly need to change to a directory in your home directory.

Once that's done, you can run XEmacs in your terminal; assuming you created a new directory in your homedir called 'installs' just like I did, you can run it by:

~/installs/bin/xemacs

Job done!

Adding in other packages
You can add in other packages to make XEmacs more useful. For example, I wanted cperl-mode to work, but it isn't there without installing the perl-modes package. Rather than install various different packages, I just installed the whole lot by downloading 2 tarballs and unpacking them. Again, you'll want to choose a different mirror, one closer to the US, most likely, and the path to where you downloaded the files will most likely be different, but you'll hopefully get the idea:

mkdir ~/downloads cd ~/downloads wget ftp://ftp.uninett.no/pub/xemacs/packages/xemacs-sumo.tar.bz2 wget ftp://ftp.uninett.no/pub/xemacs/packages/xemacs-mule-sumo.tar.bz2 cd /home/mkns/installs/ tar jxf /home/mkns/downloads/xemacs-sumo.tar.bz2 tar jxf /home/mkns/downloads/xemacs-mule-sumo.tar.bz2