6/12/2023 0 Comments Emacs tutorial![]() That being said – it's daunting! While it isn't as hard to figure out how to quit Emacs as it is for Vim, doing anything of minor complexity, especially in a terminal-based Emacs UI, can be really difficult. ![]() Emacs is a programmer's editor – sure, you can write and edit text, but you can also configure what it means to write in Emacs, and what it means to edit: not just text, but things like your emails or tweets, too. Throughout this month's Bytesized newsletters, I've been exploring text editors. Org, as most people in the Emacs community call it, is somewhere between a todo list, an interactive code execution environment, and a writing tool, all-in-one. It is not just bigger and brighter it simply makes everything else vanish.Įmacs has seen renewed interest in recent years because of org-mode: a deceptively simple plain-text organization tool built into most Emacs distributions. If you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. ![]() It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It was created by Richard Stallman enough said. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It's not just for programmers, either – here's the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson on Emacs: In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. It has an infamous reputation among programmers and writers as being one of the most daunting tools you can pick up in the programming world, and for good reason: from top to bottom, every single piece of the editor is customizable and extensible to your liking. In this issue of Bytesized, I'll unpack how to learn Emacs, some great setups that make it easy to get started with Emacs, and, if you're interested in why Emacs, deep dives on what it means to build and use text editors, especially ones that give you complete control over your editing experience.Įmacs is an incredibly customizable text editor built on top of Lisp.
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