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What is "Emacs"?


Guest greeneggs
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Guest greeneggs

I had trouble copying/pasting the other day (software bug?) and so I used something called "Emacs" for this and after I was done, I began looking over this program and have no idea what it's even used for. I've heard it mentioned many times in Unix circles but it looks like Emacs has many different uses. So what exactly do people use it for?. A text editor?. A programming environment?. Are there any extras available to extend it's features?. Any skins?.

 

Thank's

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It's whatever you want it to be. It can be extended with lisp and other languages. People use it as a web browser, for example. At its heart though, it's a text editor. I've been using emacs for many years, stretching back to micro-emacs on my old Atari computers and it's a wonderful program. I still prefer vi, personally though.

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from this page:

Emacs is different things to different people. Depending who you ask, you'll could get any of the following responses:

· Text Editor

· Mail Client

· News Reader

· Word Processor

· Religion

· Integrated Development Environment

· Whatever you want it to be!

But for our purposes, let's just pretend it's a text editor--an amazingly flexible text editor.

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emacs+ediff is a most powerful tool for comparing ascii files. You can easily move differences from one file to another in either direction, edit files on the fly, compile them, etc...

 

> Are there any extras available to extend it's features?. Any skins?.

 

If you like whistles and gadgets, checkout xemacs. I think it comes from a different team, but for basic things (latex, email, scripting) should have the same functionality.

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