If there's a function you want to invoke that hasn't been bound yet, you can just type the name of the function into the command buffer, much as you would launch an application from a Linux terminal. Nearly every action in Emacs is a Lisp function and can be bound to a keyboard combination. To split your editing window (called a "buffer" in Emacs) horizontally, you press C-x and then the number 2. For instance, to open a file, you press C-x to enter command mode, and then C-f to find the file you want to open. Some keyboard bindings are combinations of several key presses. The same goes for Alt/Meta: if you're meant to press Alt-X, then the notation is M-x. When you need to press the Ctrl key and another key together, the action is written as, for example, C-x (meaning Ctrl+X) or C-c ( Ctrl+C). In the documentation, the Ctrl key is represented as C and the Alt key as M (because before the Alt key was called "Alt," it was called "Meta"). This includes devices without traditional keyboards and over networks that may not transmit modifier keys (such as Ctrl and Alt) correctly.īy default, Emacs keybindings revolve mostly around the Ctrl and Alt keys.
There's a method to this apparent madness, though, because Emacs is built to be flexible in how it's used. Learning Emacs can be difficult because it uses keyboard combinations fundamentally different from the way modern computers do. eBook: An introduction to programming with Bash.Try for free: Red Hat Learning Subscription.Still, it does a lot more than just text editing.
It used to be considered an unusually large tool for what it did, but with modern editors using web browser engines and JavaScript servers as their backends, a "simple" editor written in C and Lisp hardly makes a dent on system resources. Easy on system resourcesĬompared to modern programming editors, Emacs is fairly lightweight. Emacs' appeal crosses industries and interests for the following reasons. FeaturesĬomputer enthusiasts don't love Emacs just because it happens to be old and free. Today, although there are other emacsen (the plural of "emacs" is "emacsen"), the most common version of Emacs is GNU Emacs. Stallman started the GNU project, Emacs became one of its most successful applications. In 1983, Richard Stallman released a bundle of his macros under the name editing macros, or emacs for short. Editing big documents this way can get tedious, so people started developing macros to perform common, related tasks. Instead, a text editor was a command that could generate words and dump them into a file, or find and replace words in a file, or remove lines from a file, and so on. A text editor is essentially a word processor without any of the decoration like fancy fonts and page styles or page layouts.Įarly text editors were so rudimentary that they couldn't even open an entire text document at once. In the early days of computing, word processors didn't exist at all, and text editors barely did. As time has shown, however, once you learn the basics, you have a powerful, efficient, and extremely hackable editor for life. Users love Emacs because it features efficient commands for common but complex actions and for the plugins and configuration hacks that have developed around it for nearly 40 years.īecause it's an old editor that was developed well before modern computer conventions and terminology existed (for instance, you "visit" instead of "opening" a file, and you "write" instead of "save," and so on), Emacs is often viewed as complex and even mysterious. Welcome to the communityĮmacs is a text editor designed for POSIX operating systems and available on Linux, BSD, macOS, Windows, and more.
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