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Welcome to WikEmacs - A Community Maintained Emacs Wiki

WikEmacs (pronounced wikimacs) collects useful resources for working with GNU Emacs. It is intended as a next generation alternative to the traditional EmacsWiki.

See WikEmacs:Guidelines for information on editing this wiki.

Getting started with Emacs

• Learning Resources and getting help

• Quitting Emacs: type `C-x C-c` (that's Control-X, Control-C)

Text editing in Emacs

• Search and replace
  • Incremental Search
  • Regexp Search
• Undo and redo
• Spell check
• International Users
• Remote Editing via FTP, ssh, etc.
• Emacs server and emacsclient
• Registers
• Bookmarks
• Rectangles

Automation in Emacs

• Keyboard macros
• Emacs Lisp

Configuring Emacs

• Custom for choosing and setting options.
• Scripting your init.el file (formerly .emacs) using Emacs Lisp .

Convenience

• Completion and selection
  • Ido: Interactively do things
  • Helm: incremental completion and selection (formerly Anything)
  • Icicles
  • Abbrev and dabbrev
  • Auto-complete and hippie-expand
  • YaSnippet

Typesetting, Document Markup and Document Creation in Emacs

Emacs supports a wide range of Markup languages to help you in your workflow of document creation.

Debugging

• gdb

REPLs

Interactive command-line environments for Lisp. (Read-Eval-Print-Loop)

• Inferior Emacs Lisp Mode (IELM), for interacting with Emacs' own internal Lisp
• mozrepl, for interacting with an external web browser's internal JavaScript engine
• SLIME, for interacting with an external Common Lisp or Clojure instance

Within Emacs, Ediff provides sophisticated diff and merge functions. Both vc and dvc integrate well with ediff.

Communication

• Blogging
• Chat
• Email
• Feed reading
• Microblogging
• Usenet news

Web browsing

• Launching and interacting with an external browser from emacs
• Using emacs as a browser's external editor, either when entering text on web pages or when viewing a web page's source document or both.

See also Workflow:Browsing

Shells and terminal emulation

Within Emacs you can interact with various shells and other command-line/text-mode programs running as a sub-process within an Emacs terminal emulator:

• ansi-term
• shell
• term
• multi-term

eshell is a shell (not a terminal emulator, nor a process hosted in one) written in pure Emacs Lisp . It is very powerful, flexible and customizable, but poorly documented at time of writing.

Emacs itself is fully functional either in a terminal or a windowing system. Some keystrokes available under window systems may not work in a terminal and vice versa.

Accessibility

• Emacspeak for the visually challenged.

Security and cryptography

• Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) support and integration

Getting Involved

• IRC Channel

• Mailing list archives

• Browsable source repository

Contributing to Emacs

Niche Uses

• Media player
• Presentations
• Screencasts
• Statistics
• Binary files
• Docview
• Pictures
  • Inline Images
  • Artist mode

Games and Entertainment

• Tetris
• Doctor

• Humor

History

• My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs

• XEmacs and GNU Emacs

Popular Culture and Community

• Adding Emacs-style key bindings to other programs and operating systems.
• St Ignucius and the Church of Emacs
• Saving the world from vi