Classnotes | UNIX01 | RecentChanges | Preferences Showing revision 1 Emacs can best be described as a working environment featuring an editor, a mailer, a newsreader, and a Lisp interpretor. It has been joked that Emacs has everything, including the kitchen sink. Emacs is in stark contrast with the vi editor we just looked it: Whereas vi is intended to be small and lean with only the functions you need for editing, Emacs is large and featurefull (some would argue bloated) with whatever functions you might possibly need for day-to-day life. In this class, we will only examine the Emacs editor functionality, but it is useful to know that it is more than just an editor.
Emacs was really the first GNU program. It was created by Richard Stallman long before the Free-Software movement ever began. In addition to normal Emacs (which is console based) there is a GUI version called XEmacs.
Emacs derives much of its power and flexibility from its ability to manipulate buffers. Emacs could be described as a buffer-oriented editor. Whenever you edit a file in any editor, the file is copied into a work buffer, and editing operations are made on the word buffer. In many editors, there is only one work buffer, allowing you to open only one file. Emacs can manage many work buffers at once, allowing you to edit multiple files at once. Emacs extends to concepts of buffers to cover any task. When you compose mail, you open a new buffer. When you read news, the news is fed into a buffer. Switching from one task to another is simply a matter of switching buffers.
The Emacs editor operates very much like a standard word processor. The keys on your keyboard are input characters. Commands are implemented with special keys such as control (CTRL) and meta (ALT). There is no special input mode, as there was in Vi, instead you type your text and if you need to execute a command, you use the CTRL key. Such an organization often times makes Emacs easier to use for UNIX newbies, however Emacs itself is anything but simple.
