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

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:

What is your comfort level with Emacs?: Beginner; Intermediate; Expert; Vim User; Other

What do you want to accomplish now?: Install Or Upgrade; Customize Emacs; Tweak Key Bindings; Learn more Emacs (Tutorials)

What do you use Emacs for?: Text Editing; Programming; Document authoring; Getting Organized; Emailing; Chatting; Blogging; Browsing; Other

How do you involve yourself with the community?: Category:Emacs User; Category:Emacs Contributor; Category:WikEmacs Contributor; Other

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

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

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.

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:

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

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

Main Page

Contents