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Friday, April 10, 2009

Viewing CHM files in Emacs

.chm files are used for documentation and are generally distributed by Microsoft and other companies that accompanies their product. That is, when they're not using PDF.

Well, Emacs can view those CHM files within its buffer.  This page on Emacswiki tells you how to setup Emacs to view chm files.  Note that it requires archmage which is needed to extract the chm content and it looks there is no binary for Windows.  Unless of course, you'd want to build a binary for the Windows platform.  Those with cygwin installed might have an easier time.


1 comment:

Denis Zhdanov said...

Have you succeeded in configuring emacs to view *.chm files? I followed instructions from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ChmView (installed archmage, downloaded chm-view.el and updated ~/.emacs) but the result on executing 'chm-view-dired' from dired when *.chm file is under the caret is that new browser tab appears with url like http://localhost:534772/. It doesn't contain any text though.

Attempt to see *.chm from dired by pressing 'v' against the *.chm shows not-human-readable content.

One more thing - I'm not sure was is meant by 'you can bind command "chm-view-dired" with "dired-mode-map", then you can view CHM file that marked in dired' (emacs newbie is here).