Emacs editing environment, Part 1: Learn the basics of Emacs

Level: Intermediate

Michael Stutz (stutz@dsl.org), Author, Consultant

20 Mar 2007

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Master the Emacs editor and delve into the depths of its most advanced editing commands that have made it famous. The open source Emacs editor (one of the powerhouses of UNIX(R) computing) is a large, complex application that does everything from editing text to functioning as a complete development environment. It's rich in features and is unlike any other program you're likely to have encountered, especially in the way you specify and input commands. This tutorial, the first in a series, gets you going by providing a concise, hands-on introduction to the most important Emacs editing concepts and features.

In this tutorial

• Introducing the Emacs editing environment
  • Starting Emacs
  • Anatomy of an Emacs window
  • Learn how to type Emacs key bindings
  • Stopping Emacs
  
  
• Buffers and files
  • Make a new file from scratch
  • Starting Emacs with filenames
  • Open a file
  • Visit a buffer
  • Kill a buffer
  • Save buffers to disk
  • Summary of buffer and file commands
  
  
• Edit text in Emacs
  • Type in and move through a buffer
  • Delete, undo, redo
  • Undo and redo
  • Run a command multiple times
  • Table of editing keys
  
  
• The mark and the mouse
  • Mark, yank, kill
  • Mark and move with the mouse
  
  

Objectives

The primary objective of this tutorial is to introduce you to the Emacs editor, give you a concise introduction to the application and its design philosophy, and show you how to be productive in this editing environment.

Prerequisites

Previous knowledge of Emacs is not required to benefit from this tutorial; however, you should have a basic understanding of what text editors and word processors do. Although this tutorial is written for all levels of UNIX expertise, it's helpful if you have an understanding of the UNIX filesystem, including:

• Files
• Directories
• Permissions
• Filesystem hierarchy

System requirements

This tutorial requires a user account on any UNIX-based system that has a recent copy of Emacs installed.

There are several varieties of Emacs; the original and most popular is GNU Emacs, which is published online by the GNU Project.

You should have a recent copy of GNU Emacs -- one that is at version 20 or greater. Versions 20 and 21 are the most commonly available, and development snapshots of version 22 are also available. This tutorial works with any of these versions for Emacs. If your system is running something older, it's time to upgrade.

Duration

2 hours

Formats

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