6. The Emacs Interface

LinkController's reporting system is designed to be independent of the interface to it, and often the shell interface will be all that is needed. However another convenient interface is through emacs. There are two parts to this integration.

6.1 Finding Files with Broken Links		An Emacs program to display broken links.
6.2 Finding Broken Links in Files Within Emacs		Finding broken links in a file.

6.1 Finding Files with Broken Links

There is a special Emacs mode called link-report-dired written for locating files with broken links. The mode is based on find-dired and works very similarly. It runs the program link-report with an option which makes it list file names in the same way as the ls program does. The user can then move around the buffer as normal in Emacs and enter files using a single key press (normally f).

6.2 Finding Broken Links in Files Within Emacs

The program check-page was specially designed so that it outputs in a format which can be read by Emacs' compile mode. You can use it within Emacs and then step from error to error correcting them.

To do this, after you have set up your system and run `test-link' a few times. checking use the command M-x compile RET check-page filename RET . You will now see another buffer open up with all of the errors shown there. You can use the key M-` (that's a real back quote, not an apostrophe) to step between errors.

The one problem with `check-page' is that if you have just created a file containing new links it should really verify them by testing each one. This makes it more suitable for use during link correction of existing pages than during writing new pages.