| | | Emacs |
Many people consider Emacs the best tool for text
processing in the Unix environment. Emacs is a total work
environment: it can be used not only for text editing, but for
reading mail and news, running an interactive shell, ftp,
launching other programs, working with files and directories,
etc.
Advantages: extremely powerful; highly customizable and
extendible; widely available on Unix systems worldwide; can be
run either under X-Windows with mouse support, or from a dumb
terminal.
Disadvantages: you have to invest some time to learn
to use it properly, as is the case with any sophisticated tool.
For a quick start with Emacs, select Emacs Tutorial from the Emacs Help menu. For complete information, select Info from the Help menu. The Emacs manual is also available in hypertext form on the Web; a paper copy of the GNU Emacs Manual by Richard Stallman is available from the Free Software Foundation. Another good book is Learning GNU Emacs, 2nd Edition, by Debra Cameron, Bill Rosenblatt, and Eric Raymond, published in 1996 by O'Reilly.
Two of the main Emacs newsgroups are gnu.emacs.help and gnu.emacs.announce. There is an on-line page of Emacs reference materials.
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | Emacs |