If you use scheme inside emacs a lot you may want to add the following to your .emacs file: (load "/mit/scheme/etc/scheme") This will load the scheme library when ever you start emacs. This is the library that contains all the scheme indentation definitions (autoload 'run-scheme "/mit/scheme/etc/xscheme" "Run an inferior Scheme process." t) This will autoload xscheme when you do C-u M-x run-scheme. This is the library where all the scheme interaction procedure are defined. These previous commands will save you the trouble of having to do: M-x load-file /mit/scheme/etc/scheme.elc M-x load-file /mit/scheme/etc/xscheme.elc You can also set the program name and arguments that emacs uses to run scheme with: (setq scheme-program-name "/mit/scheme/vaxbin/scheme") (setq scheme-band-name "/mit/scheme/vax-7.0/lib/sicp.bin") (setq scheme-program-arguments "-heap 300") The heap size is the amount of memory that you reserve for scheme, the default is 200, the max heap size depends on what else you are running on the system and what type of workstation you are on. The VS3100 and DECStation3100 support heaps up to 800, where as all other workstations usually support heaps up to 400 (scheme actually supports heaps of up to 3000, but athena workstations don't have enough memory) The actual heap size in terms of Megabytes of physical memory used by scheme is (heapsize x 4 x 100KBytes), so a heap size of 250 = 1MegaByte of physical memory. The band is the file that contains the initial scheme environment. If you want to customize your environment you can save your own band and load it instead. To learn more about saving bands read the file /mit/scheme/documentation/user.txt, the section on "World Images". It is not necessary to include the -emacs in the scheme-program-arguments statement since emacs automatically puts it in.