1. Introduction to Emacs
Trang-Khon Trieu1
2012-10-29 Mon
1
hajimezhao@gmail.com
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2. The story of Emacs
Emacs is a family of text editors, described as “the extensible,
customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor.”
It is written in Lisp by Richard Stallman and under GNU
License
Trang-Khon Trieu Introduction to Emacs 2012-10-29 Mon 2 / 11

3. What are Emacs for?
Text editing
Coding & Debugging
File Management
Calendar, tasks management
Email reading, web surfing
etc
You can
(1) customize Emacs in anyway you want;
(2) develop more features by writing code in Emacs Lisp
Trang-Khon Trieu Introduction to Emacs 2012-10-29 Mon 3 / 11

4. Why Emacs?
lightweight editor (in comparison to Eclipse, NetBean)
an integrated platform for general purposes (email, web,
coding, etc)
data in the form of text files
universal data structure, not locked in any specific format (XML,
HTML, etc), thus technology-independent
automating by scripts (accumulation over time)
searchable by any search engine (Google Desktop, Recoll, etc)
keyboard-driven
faster than mouse-driven
muscle memory (subconscious)
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5. Concepts
Control key vs. Meta key
Buffer vs. Windows
Major mode vs. Minor mode
Major modes: ruby mode, java mode, dired mode, org-mode,
etc.
Minor mode: show line number, scrollbar, status info, etc.
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6. Useful Major Modes
org-mode
quick note taking
information organization, task and time management
export to html, pdf, latex, freemind, etc
publish blogs: wordpress
org-beamer
write presentation slides
org-babel
execute codes inside org-mode files
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7. Package management
In Emacs, press: M-x package-list-packages
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8. Customization
define your own
commands
keys
mapping between commands and keys
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9. References
GNU Emacs wiki - link
The ultimate collection of emacs resources - link
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10. Notes
This slide is created by Emacs using org-beamer without any
decoration effort.
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11. FIN
Question
Thank you!
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