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Welcome to WikEmacs - A Community Maintained Emacs Wiki

About

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 GNULinux, OSX and Windows. It supports variety of Programming languages.

• Key Bindings
• Look and Feel
• Emacs for Vim users
• Starter Kits
• Learning Resources and getting help
• Package Managers
• 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
• 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 for Development

Programming and Scripting Languages

• Ada
• antlr
• Arc
• 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