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Welcome to WikEmacs - A Community Maintained Emacs Wiki

About

Useful resources for working with GNU Emacs. See also Emacs (Wikipedia).

WikEmacs (pronounced wikimacs) is intended as a next generation alternative to the traditional EmacsWiki.

Consult Mediawiki User's Guide for contributing to this wiki. You can use mediawiki.el to contribute to the wiki from the comfort of your Emacs.

Getting started with Emacs

The latest stable release is Emacs-23.4. The next major release is Emacs-24.1 and is in Pretest stage.

Emacs is available on all popular Operating Systems including GNULinux, OSX and Windows. See the respective pages for installation instruction and platform specific customization.

• Key Bindings

Emacs ships with a bunch of Cheatsheets or Reference Cards for popular packages. They are located in the refcards subdirectory of data-directory. Eval the below form to jump to this directory, quickly.

<syntax-highlight lang="lisp"> (find-file (expand-file-name "refcards" data-directory)) </syntaxhighlight>

• Look and Feel
• Emacs for Vim users
• Starter Kits
• Learning Resources and getting help
• Package Managers
• Emacs Terminology
  • Buffer (contrasted with file)
  • Windows and frames (compared with panes and windows respectively)
  • Point and mark (compared with insertion point/cursor and ...?)
  • Kill and Yank (contrasted with cut and paste) and the kill ring
  • Region (compared and contrasted with selection)
  • Fill (compared with line wrap)
  • Case-fold (compared with case sensitivity)
  • Narrow and widen (compared with collapse and expand)
• 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
• Abbreviations and Templates
• Auto-completion
• 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

Emacs and Desktop Integration

• Dired
  • Archive mode
• Battery
• Notifications

Typesetting, Document Markup and Document Creation in Emacs

• Markdown
• Org export to HTML, PDF etc
• SGML , HTML and XML
• TeX, LaTeX, TeXinfo, BibTeX etc.

Emacs as an IDE

Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Emacs is called CEDET. See Gentle Introduction to CEDET.

For Literate Programming see Org Babel.

Programming and Scripting Languages

• Ada
• antlr
• asm
• awk
• C
• C++
• Clojure
• Common Lisp
• Emacs Lisp
• Fortran
• Groovy
• Haskell
• Icon
• IDL
• Java
• JavaScript
• make
• Modula2
• OCaml
• Octave
• Pascal and Delphi
• perl
• PHP
• PostScript
• Prolog
• Python
• Ruby
• Scala
• Scheme
• shell script
• Simula
• SQL
• tcl
• Visual Basic

Markup Languages

• CSS
• HTML
• JSON
• Markdown
• SGML
• XML

Compiling

• flymake

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

Version Control

Emacs supports many Version Control systems out of the box and provides bindings and other shortcuts for a better workflow between Emacs and these systems.

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

Productivity

• Org Mode
• calc
• calendar
• notification
• diary
• Contacts: bbdb

Communication

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

Web browsing and web development

• w3: a pure-Emacs-Lisp text-mode web browser.
• w3m-el: The text-mode w3m web browser hosted and enhanced within Emacs, with rudimentary inline image support but no JavaScript.
• 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.

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

• Reporting bugs
• Testers
  • Profiling
  • Memory Usage
  • Reporting Bugs

• Developers
  • Coding Guidelines
  • Copyright Assignment
    • Contributing to Emacs
    • Copyright assignment
  • Unit Testing
• Core Developers
  • Project Leaders
    • Stefan Monnier
    • Chong Yidong
  • Others

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