Emacs

Emacs is a powerful text editor and much more. It also includes or has available a vast number of plug-ins (usually referred to as extensions or packages) for programming, reading electronic mail or usenet, surfing the web, and a wide variety of other tasks. You can also write your own extensions in the emacs lisp programming language.

GNU Emacs and XEmacs

There are two main variants of emacs: GNU Emacs and XEmacs. There is cross-pollenation between the two camps, and in fact many of the packages are the same between the two. There is no particularly concise way to describe how they differ; even if we made a list of what features are in one and not the other, it would quickly go out of date with new versions. If you are new to emacs, you wouldn't go wrong with either one; choose what your colleagues use or what is most convenient to obtain or whatever.

Mailing lists and newsgroups

The general newsgroup for discussions of Emacs (especially GNU Emacs) is comp.emacs.

The newsgroup for discussion of XEmacs is comp.emacs.xemacs.

CVS and Emacs

Emacs ships with a package called VC, which supports CVS among other version control systems. In addition, there is a package called pcl-cvs, which provides access to a greater range of CVS features than VC does.

Getting Emacs

I suppose we need to make an explicit disclaimer that the distributions listed below are not supported by Cyclic. In most cases we are just redistributing or linking to a distribution provided by someone else, and didn't even help write any of it.

Most linux distributions include GNU Emacs or XEmacs or both.

The book Programming with GNU Software comes with a CD-ROM which includes GNU emacs for six popular unix platforms.

For more information

GNU Emacs Manual is the user manual for GNU Emacs. It comes with a reference card. Probably most (not all) of it also applies to XEmacs. The manual is also typically distributed in electronic form along with Emacs.

The books Programming with GNU Software and A Practical Guide to Linux each contain a chapter introducing emacs.

The Emacs reference card is a quick reference to emacs commands.

For XEmacs, see the official XEmacs site. Emacs.org is a nice site with emphasis on GNU Emacs.

For more information about Emacs for Windows (mostly GNU Emacs, but also with a mention of XEmacs), see the GNU Emacs on Windows NT and Windows 95 site.

Whatis.com has an emacs page which includes a slightly longer description of emacs than we have here and links to a few comparisons of emacs with other editors.