This document is a very brief intro to Emacs, one of the most popular editors among UNIX progammers. It is very powerful, chock full of features, fully customizable and extensible using Lisp, and very easy to use under X Windows. The other main alternative is vi. If you choose to use vi you're on your own, but then if you're sadistic enough to use vi then that probably suits you fine.
For more information on Emacs, click here for a handy Emacs reference card, Emacs FAQ, etc.
emacs &The ampersand character will place Emacs in the background so that you can continue to use the xterm window. Using Emacs under X is nice, since you can use the nice menu bar at the top of the screen to do most everything.
If you're dialing in over a modem and just have a text screen, type:
emacsFrom the fact that you have no
DISPLAY
environment variable, Emacs will deduce it is simply
to use a text mode.
Emacs allows tab-completion, like tcsh.
Since Emacs is largely written in Lisp, it is fully customizable by
using Lisp commands entered while using Emacs or (more often) loaded
automatically from your
Since Emacs extensions can be written in Lisp, many people have added
amazing capabilities to Emacs over the years, including syntax
coloring (under X), RCS/SCCS/CVS source code version control commands,
a compile mode, a mail mode, and much, much more. See the Emacs info
page or your local Emacs guru for more information.
~/.emacs file when Emacs is started
up.
cse451-TA@cs.washington.edu