Abstract

The Athena On-Line Consulting system (OLC) allows Athena users to ask questions on-line from any terminal in the Athena environment. The OLC queue of user questions is polled by Athena consultants, who establish connections with users whose questions they are qualified to answer. Consultants handle a heavy load of several thousand questions each month. However, previous tools available to consultants were primitive and limited the consultant's full potential.

The Emacs consulting tools comprise a set of specialized modules, based on the GNU Emacs text editor, enhancing the efficiency and productivity of Athena consultants. They are alternative interfaces to established programs essential to consulting, and have in some instances supplanted their predecessors. The common Emacs interface, made possible by the power of the Emacs extension language, Emacs Lisp, provides a familiar, customizable, and easily expanded environment. The tools themselves address issues of ease of use, productivity, multi-module cohesion and integration, subprocess management and protocol, and up to date state maintenance in a distributed network client/server model.