Chapter 8. The Emacs Editor

Chapter 8. The Emacs Editor

The Emacs editor is found on many Unix systems, including Linux, because it is a popular alternative to vi. Many versions are available, but this book documents the most popular one, GNU Emacs (Version 21.3), which is available from the Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs).

Emacs is much more than "just an editor"--in fact, it provides a fully integrated user environment. From within Emacs, you can issue individual shell commands or open a window where you can work in the shell, read and send mail, read news, access the Internet, write and test programs, and maintain a calendar. To fully describe Emacs would require more space than we have available. In this chapter, therefore, we focus on the editing capabilities of Emacs.

This chapter presents the following topics:

• Conceptual overview

• Command-line syntax

• Summary of emacs commands by group

• Summary of emacs commands by key

• Summary of emacs commands by name

For more information about Emacs, see the O'Reilly book Learning GNU Emacs.