Emacs: The Everything and Anything Editor

As the heading above states, GNU Emacs can do everything you think an editor should do as well as things an editor has no right to do. Think of Emacs as the Swiss Army Knife of editors.

Documentation

• GNU Emacs Manual
• Emacs Lisp Introduction
• GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
• Emacs Implementations

An excellent resource for configuring and using Emacs is the EmacsWiki.

Modes

Most of the power of Emacs is realized using modes. A mode is a bunch of Emacs Lisp (Elisp) code that enables the editor to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Most of the best modes are included in an Emacs distribution, but, as with all good software, newer version are constantly being released.

Here are some web pages for Emacs modes that I use regularly. For far too many modes to mention go to the Elisp Archive or the Emacs Lisp Package Archive (described below).

• CC Mode for C/C++ coding (Manual)
• Markdown Mode is useful for editing ikiwiki pages.
• HTML Helper Mode for HTML code.
• yasnippet is a realy well done template engine with great support for many programming language constructs. Checkout some of the screencasts on YouTube.

If you want to write an Emacs mode for a language, check out this mode creation tutorial.

Resources

Here are some other pages with neato stuff for Emacs.

• Emacs Starter Kit is an interesting way to setup Emacs configuration that is easily extensible and well documented. I have started using this package to structure my Emacs initialization files.
• Emacs Lisp Package Archive provides package management for Emacs. Type M-x package-list-packages in Emacs to manage packages
• Effective Emacs is an excellent collection of tips for elevating your Emacs skills.
• Tutorial: Emacs for Programmers
• Save your Emacs finger before it's too late