

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.

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.(inserts) the text from the clipboard to where the cursor is. (The text is removedįrom the work buffer into the "Kill Ring" – the "Kill (This is called the Mark Set" command.)Īnd removes the text. etc.Ĭ-space, You put the cursor at the beginning of the text and do C-Space or mark that place, and then move the cursor to the other end of the desired You are looking for "hello", you type h and it looks for the first Program itself moves "down" - will finally end up at top of screen Program itself moves "up" - will finally end up at bottom of screen Messages while you edit the program to make the corrections.

True if you compile and get a bunch of error messages-you can see the error Sometimes it helps toīe able to see the execution output while you are editing. To start editing by just clicking in the edit window. It is convenient toīe able to see the program while you run it. You can leave the editor there while you run the program. Note that you don't have to exit the editor-you have to save, but Then save it-use C-x C-s-and thenĬompile it and run it in the other window. Opening one window in which you run a program and another window for editing.Įdit a program in the edit window.

(you can repeat this to undo several previous commands)Ĭan use the arrow keys and also page up and page down to move the cursor. Out of the command that you are in - try this when you don't know what is Other places use the notation ^X or ctrl-X.) (Note: M-x means to first hit the escape key and then hit x.)Įmacs (Note: C-x means to press the control key and while you are holding itĭown, press x.
#Quit emacs how to
With no file name in the command line, you will get instructions on how to disable the binding that has backspace call "help" enable it do the same as delete (global-set-key 'delete-backward-char) (global-set-key 'help-command) overrides mark-whole-buffer disallow tabs ( setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) set indenting to 4 places instead of default 2 ( defun indentk () ( setq c-basic-offset 4)) (add-hook 'c-mode-hook ' indentk)īest way to get started with emacs is to do the tutorial. To enable the backspace key, disable tabs,Īnd customize the indention, put the following statements in your.
