emacs

Emacs and its derivatives are a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as “the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor”. Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s and continues actively as of 2016. Emacs has over 2,000 built-in commands and allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Emacs Lisp provides a deep extension capability allowing users and developers to write new commands using a dialect of the Lisp programming language. Extensions have been written to manage email, files, outlines, and RSS feeds. Some users find they can do almost all their work from within Emacs, not just editing text.

The original EMACS was written in 1976 by Richard Stallman and Guy L. Steele, Jr. as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS.

Emacs is not only a very popular open source editor, but also it has a strong support by its users. Even, it exists the Church of Emacs, formed by Richard Stallman. In that church they called vi the editor of the beast (vi-vi-vi). Emacs is, along with vi, one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture. Both are among the oldest application programs still in use.

See also

Vi_Vim

Material

• https://www.linux.com/learn/gnu-emacs-101-beginners
• http://www.tuxradar.com/content/emacs-tutorial-beginners
• http://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course/emacs-tutorial.html
• http://cmgm.stanford.edu/classes/unix/emacs.html

Books

• Cameron, Debra (1998). GNU Emacs Pocket Reference. O’Reilly Media
• Petersen, Mickey. (2015). Mastering Emacs. Self-published
• Glickstein, Bob (1997). Writing GNU Emacs Extensions. O’Reilly Media