Chapter 12. An Overview of the emacs Editor

The only screen-oriented editor that's guaranteed to be included with the Unix system is vi, but that doesn't mean that it's the only good editor available in Unix! An alternative editor that has become quite popular in the past decade (remember that Unix is over 25 years old) is called emacs. This hour teaches you the fundamentals of this very different and quite powerful editing environment.

Goals for This Hour

In this hour, you will learn how to

  • Launch emacs and insert text

  • Move around in a file

  • Delete characters and words

  • Search and replace in emacs

  • Use the emacs tutorial and help system

  • Work with other files

Remember what I said in the preceding hour when I mentioned the emacs editor: emacs is modeless, ...

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