Linux in a Nutshell, Fifth Edition

Conceptual Overview | 705

Emacs

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Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

such as having appropriate key bindings available and automatically indenting

according to standard conventions for that type of document. There are two types

of modes: major and minor. The major modes include modes for various

programming languages such as C or Perl, for text processing (e.g., SGML or even

straight text), and many more. One particularly useful major mode is Dired

(Directory Editor), which has commands that let you manage directories. Minor

modes set or unset features that are independent of the major mode, such as auto-

fill (which controls word wrapping), insert versus overwrite, and auto-save. For a

full discussion of modes, see Learning GNU Emacs (O’Reilly) or the Emacs Info

documentation system (C-h i).

Buffer and Window

When you open a file in Emacs, the file is put into a buffer so you can edit it. If

you open another file, that file goes into another buffer. The view of the buffer

contents that you have at any point in time is called a window. For a small file, the

window might show the entire file; for a large file, it shows only a portion of a file.

Emacs allows multiple windows to be open at the same time, to display the

contents of different buffers or different portions of a single buffer.

Point and Mark

When you are editing