Emacs

GNU Emacs logo.

Emacs (Editor MACroS) is an extensible, customizable, text editor. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

It is often lovingly referred to as its own self-contained operating system. There is a humors feud between users of VIM and users of Emacs. Followers of Emacs are called members of The Church of Emacs. You can read about this here.

History

Richard Stallman began writing GNU Emacs in 1984 has a free software alternative to the proprietary Gosling Emacs.

This was the first program released by the GNU Project.

Plan9 doesn't like Emacs. This is the man page for it. Very clearly they are against it. Also this happened.

GNU Emacs is frequently mentioned in jokes on the GNU Humor Archive, and even has a song.

How to

If you want to learn how to use and configure GNU Emacs you can start by following Uncle Dave's tutorials

Basics

Movement

Emacs uses the insane UNIX keybindings, meaning this keybindings also works for bash, and much others: (C means Ctrl and M means Meta (Which can be esc or alt)

C-f: Forward a char

C-b: Backward a char

C-p: Previous Line

C-n Next line

M-f: Forward word

M-b Forward word

C-e: End of line

C-a Beginning of the line

M-e End of the paragraph

M-a: Beginning of the paragraph

External links

• GNU Emacs website
• Manuals for Emacs and Emacs Lisp
• Emacs Wiki