The IDL modes for Emacs idl.el and idl-shell.el still need a competent maintainer. If you know some Emacs Lisp, you might want to give it a try. Two things I have noticed with newer versions of Emacs (I use GNU Emacs 20.2) are: * There is some conflict between the C-mode distributed with Emacs and the current IDL-mode: If C-mode is loaded in any Emacs buffer, IDL-mode refuses to font-lock (=colorize) the IDL code and also gives an error message about not being able to support Imenu. * Emacs 20 does not fontify common blocks the way Emacs 19 did. (with reference and variable fonts) Even if you do not want to maintain the modes: If you know enough Lisp to fix the problems, I would be glad to patch the files. I recently gave both modes a higher version number, since I updated the comment information about no maintainer and about the current source code availability. idl-shell.el version 2.5 has no changes in the executable code. (comment changes only) idl.el version 1.40 adds support for editing, running the file from Emacs in Idlde. (Thanks to Lubos Pochman from RSI.) The current versions are available at: ftp://pivory.mpae.gwdg.de/pub/idl/emacs/ http://pivory.mpae.gwdg.de/idl/emacs/ http://www.mpae.gwdg.de/mpae_RZ/software/idl/emacs/ ftp://ftp.rsinc.com/pub/user_contrib/emacs/ and soon at (their mirroring seems to have failed) ftp://ftp.creaso.com/pub/user_contrib/emacs/ The files were also contributed to the Emacs Lisp archive of Ohio State university, but they only seem to update once a year. Happy editing & computing, Kevin -- Kevin Ivory Tel: +49 5556 979 434 Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie Fax: +49 5556 979 240 Max-Planck-Str. 2 mailto:Kevin.Ivory@linmpi.mpg.de D-37191 Katlenburg-Lindau, GERMANY http://www.gwdg.de/~kivory2/