Introduction

The Emacs text editor is undoubtedly the most feature-rich text editor available for the Linux platform. As such, it is impossible to comprehensively cover all the features of Emacs in a single chapter. Therefore, my intent here is to describe the basic features and provide suggestions as to where you might find more information.

Emacs comes in both character-based (see Figure 22-1) and GUI-based implementations (see Figure 22-2). Both implementations make use of pull-down menus and a dizzying array of shortcut key combinations to control functionality.

Figure 22-1. emacs

Figure 22-2. xemacs

Perhaps the biggest distinction between ...

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