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Welcome to WikEmacs - A Community Maintained Emacs Wiki

Useful resources for working with GNU Emacs, the extensible, self-documenting text editor. See also Emacs (Wikipedia).

Emacs is free software (Wikipedia).

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

See WikEmacs:Guidelines for information on editing this wiki.

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 GNU/Linux, OSX and Windows. It supports variety of Programming languages.

Explore this Wiki based on your needs. Here are some starting points:

Pages organized by your role in Emacs community

Whether you are a Emacs User, a Emacs Contributor or a Programmer, there are few things just for you.

Pages organized by your current workflow

Whether you want to write mails, browse the web, blog, read news feeds, author documents or for that matter get organized, there are few things just for you.

Pages organized by your comfort level with Emacs

Whether you are a beginner, intermediate user or an expert user, here are a few things just for you:

• Starter Kits
• Learning Resources and getting help
• Package Managers
• Key Bindings
• Look and Feel
• Emacs for Vim users
• Emacs Terminology
  • Buffer
  • Window
  • Frame
  • Point and mark
  • Killing and yanking
  • Region
  • Fill
  • 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
• 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

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 for Development

You can use Emacs to program in variety of Programming languages. If you don't see an entry for your favorite language, please create an page for it and few words about it.

Emacs also supports a wide range of Markup languages.

Compiling

• flymake

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

Emacs as an IDE

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

For Literate Programming see Org Babel.

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

• 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