The rest is written in Emacs Lisp – that’s what you’re likely to interface with directly as a user and developer – and is more than a million. The core is several hundred thousand lines of C code. What you just read is Emacs’s tagline and a one-line summary of everything Emacs stands for: Emacs is ExtensibleĮmacs is a tiny C core that forms the foundation of how it interacts with your operating system. PhilosophyĮmacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. When you can ask Emacs the right questions then – and only then – do you know Emacs. Not how long they’ve been using Emacs, and not how snazzy or personalized their Emacs is. The difference between someone who knows Emacs and someone who does not comes down to that. But you will need to learn some terminology, as Emacs has its own naming conventions basic movement and editing, so you can get around and benefit from Emacs’s superb text editing capabilities a touch of philosophy, so you know why Emacs behaves the way it does and enough knowledge to ask Emacs the right questions. So, overcoming the initial hurdle of understanding Emacs is not an insurmountable task. Every key and command – and everything in-between – is cross-referenced and easily looked up.
EMACS LOGIN MANUAL
Emacs has meticulous documentation: it has a 350,000 word manual and it is self-documenting.
That’s not to say Emacs is hostile to new users: quite the contrary. Emacs is notionally built for people who have already learned Emacs. Because of that, Emacs is – much to the chagrin of everyone who picks it up for the first time – squarely aimed at people who already know Emacs. Crafting, or shaping, your tools to meet your exacting needs is what Emacs excels at. That may seem like a weird flex, but it matters.Įmacs is the editor of tinkerers and artisans those who are eternally dissatisfied with all other tools because of their adamantine rigidity. Emacs is also built around the idea that your freedom to edit or change anything is sacrosanct: at no point will Emacs attempt to hide any part of its inner workings from you. It predates graphical user interfaces and almost all common computing standards we now take for granted. But more on that later.Įmacs is more than forty years old. You’ll also have to contend with a radically different way of thinking about how you interact with text.
No wonder so many people find it difficult to get their footing and opt for simpler editors.īut learning Emacs is more than just memorizing key bindings and commands. Emacs is a complex beast with tens of thousands of commands and even more settings that you can customize.
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