Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7. Simple Text Formatting and Specialized Editing

Emacs is fundamentally a text editor, rather than a word processor: it is a tool that creates files containing exactly what you see on the screen rather than a tool that makes text files look beautiful when printed. However, Emacs does give you the capability to do the following:

• Indent text using tabs and other indentation tricks.

• Center words, lines, and paragraphs of text.

• Hide and show portions of a document using outline mode, which gives you a feel for a document's overall structure. Outline mode can make it easier to go from rough outline, to detailed outline, to rough draft, to the final product.

• Edit by column rather than by line (especially helpful when you create or change tables or work with column-oriented datasets), referred to in Emacs as rectangle editing.

• Create simple pictures using keyboard characters or the mouse.

Much of this chapter, though, focuses on some fairly simple stuff: tabs and indenting text. We describe Emacs's behavior in primarily two major modes: fundamental mode and text mode. If you are a developer, you'll probably want to write code in a mode appropriate to the language you're using; see Chapter 9 for details. If you use a markup language like HTML, see Chapter 8 for additional relevant information.

Using Tabs

Tabs provide an easy way to do some simple formatting. While we were revising this book, we found that the way Emacs handles tabs has changed a great deal. This section describes first ...