kill9/emacs/index.md

Kill-9's Emacs things

Emacs (short for Editor MACroS) is a text editor¹ made by Carl Mikkelsen and David A. Moon in the late 70s, and had too many implementations, such as XEmacs, Freemacs, µEmacs (microemacs). in 1984, the GNU project stole rewrote the original Emacs code and the most used version of Emacs was born: GNU Emacs.

Installation

Windows users: https://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/GNU/emacs/windows/ (Or their nearly GNU mirror)

Mac Users: brew install emacs, I guess.

GNU/Linux users: probably the "emacs" package on your distro's repos

BSD users:

FreeBSD: Install off of ports tree or "pkg install emacs"

OpenBSD: pkg_add emacs or ports tree

NetBSD: pkgsrc or pkgin install emacs²

Plan 9 users: What are you doing here?

Other versions of Emacs

As mentioned above, there are other versions of emacs, most of them are obsolete (XEmacs for example). µEmacs is the emacs version used by Linus Torvalds³ I do not recommend to use it. If you want to use a mini Emacs, you should try Zile or Jed. Zile is stupidly minimum while Jed has syntax highlighting and other kind of programs. But not close to real GNU Emacs.

You can find more about Emacs on the sidebar.

Information about Emacs

In Emacs, everything is an Emacs Lisp function, each keybinding, every

M-x function is written in Emacs Lisp, Emacs Lisp is a complete programming language. So that's why you can see browsers inside Emacs.

In this book, I'll write the name of the function in front of a keybinding. Because they're pretty self explanatory

Highly work in progress, please contribute

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1. Some people call it a "operating system", but I prefer to call it a Emacs Lisp interpreter. ↩︎

2. This won't work if you don't have pkgin installed. If you don't, use pkg_add ↩︎

3. https://github.com/torvalds/uemacs ↩︎