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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 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to describe how they differ; even if we made a list of what features are in one and not the other, it would quickly go out of date with new versions.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.

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.

Where to Get Emacs:

  • 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.

More Information:

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.

Derek Price, CVS developer and technical editor of Essential CVS (Essentials line from O'Reilly Press) , and others offer consulting services and training through Ximbiot.