Emacs Introduction

Emacs is both a text editor and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), offering a wide range of functions to support programming and text editing tasks.

Text Editor Goals

• Source Power: Empowering users with extensive features.
• Speed: Efficient operation, minimizing latency.
• Understandability: Clear and intuitive user interface and commands.

These goals may sometimes compete with each other, requiring trade-offs.

Commands

Essential Commands:

• emacs -nw: Starts Emacs without a window interface, simplifying interaction, especially useful for remote server communication due to reduced latency.
• C-x C-b: Lists all open buffers.
• C-x b: Switches to a specific buffer.
• C-x s: Saves the current file.
• C-x C-f: Opens a file for editing.
• C-x d: Opens a directory for browsing and editing.

Additional Commands:

• C-x C-z: Suspend Emacs (move it to the background).