Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Learning how to learn about Emacs
Emacs has too many features. Here's a tongue-in-cheek joke:
Emacs is an operating system
that is in need of a good editor
. This section will illustrate the basic skills that one needs to
use Emacs and more importantly, to learn how to use Emacs. One of the best features of
Emacs is the immense built-in help. If you have never run Emacs before, press
Ctrl-h t
, ab-
breviated
C-h t
. This means that while holding the
Ctrl
key, press
h
, then release it, and
then press
t
. Also, note that the Emacs commands are case sensitive.
C-H T
means to press
Ctrl + Shift + H
, then hit
Shift + T
, whereas
C-h t
is performed without the shift modifier.
You'll be presented with the interactive Emacs tutorial. This tutorial will teach you the fun-
damentals of Emacs. In the tutorial, you'll see references to a meta key, which you will be
hard pressed to find on your keyboard. Command sequences, such as
M-x
, mean to hold
down the meta key while pressing
x
. Depending on your system, the meta key may be
Alt
or
Option
. If neither of these work, you can press the
Esc
key and release it to provide
meta.
The tutorial is very good and for the rest of this chapter, it is assumed that you have com-
pleted this tutorial or have an equivalent level of knowledge to understand the more ad-
vanced features.
Note
Some other helpful resources to learn Emacs are Sacha Chua's
How to Learn Emacs
dia-
v2-Large.png
)
and the official
Emacs 24 Reference Card
(
https://www.gnu.org/software/
Tip
If you are a vi user, there is a mode that emulates most vi keybindings, called the viper
mode (
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ViperMode
).
