11/14/2023 0 Comments Emacs melpaReal-Time DisplayĪlthough this part may not be a distinction worth talking about today, editors in the 70s operated on lines instead of the whole screen. So if you rebind keys or customize a variable, Emacs knows about the changes.Īlmost all variables and commands are not only documented, but cross-referenced with Emacs’s manual. Emacs is built around the idea that it’s introspectable.Įmacs’s answer is always correct because it’s querying its internal state. My point is that you can always ask Emacs for help: from the mundane to the esoteric. Emacs pioneered docstrings in the 70s, and today it’s supported by most modern programming languages. When you write code or extend Emacs, it’s customary to summarize what your code does as a documentation string. Self-documentingĮmacs is self-documenting. In fact, you don’t even need to write code to change many aspects of it.Ĭombine that ease of use with Emacs’s inherent extensibility, and it’s easy to conjure up a set of changes that enable you and perhaps your coworkers to accomplish something that you couldn’t easily do before. And there’s a low skill barrier: even users with little or no Emacs knowledge can come away and feel like they’ve personalized their Emacs. You can customize – either using some of Emacs’s many formal customizable options, or with a sprinkling of Emacs Lisp – nearly everything.Īnd I don’t mean it like the incredulous claims people made about Linux in the 1990s that “anybody can, you know, just download the Linux kernel and hack on it.” Sure, you can but how many improvements can you make to the kernel’s USB driver or memory manager?Įmacs is designed with customization in mind. Like all sufficiently complex programs, Emacs has switches you can tweak - tens of thousands of them, in actual fact. Community packages add up to millions of lines of code also.Īlthough you can easily recompile Emacs from source, the guiding philosophy is that anything that a user would reasonably want to modify belongs in the Lisp layer.Įxtending Emacs is as simple as writing a little bit of Lisp and evaluating it from inside your running Emacs instance. The rest is written in Emacs Lisp – that’s what you’re likely to interface with directly as a user and developer – and is more than a million. The core is several hundred thousand lines of C code. What you just read is Emacs’s tagline and a one-line summary of everything Emacs stands for: Emacs is ExtensibleĮmacs is a tiny C core that forms the foundation of how it interacts with your operating system. ![]() PhilosophyĮmacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. When you can ask Emacs the right questions then – and only then – do you know Emacs. Not how long they’ve been using Emacs, and not how snazzy or personalized their Emacs is. The difference between someone who knows Emacs and someone who does not comes down to that. But you will need to learn some terminology, as Emacs has its own naming conventions basic movement and editing, so you can get around and benefit from Emacs’s superb text editing capabilities a touch of philosophy, so you know why Emacs behaves the way it does and enough knowledge to ask Emacs the right questions. So, overcoming the initial hurdle of understanding Emacs is not an insurmountable task. Every key and command – and everything in-between – is cross-referenced and easily looked up. Emacs has meticulous documentation: it has a 350,000 word manual and it is self-documenting. That’s not to say Emacs is hostile to new users: quite the contrary. Emacs is notionally built for people who have already learned Emacs. ![]() Because of that, Emacs is – much to the chagrin of everyone who picks it up for the first time – squarely aimed at people who already know Emacs. Crafting, or shaping, your tools to meet your exacting needs is what Emacs excels at. That may seem like a weird flex, but it matters.Įmacs is the editor of tinkerers and artisans those who are eternally dissatisfied with all other tools because of their adamantine rigidity. Emacs is also built around the idea that your freedom to edit or change anything is sacrosanct: at no point will Emacs attempt to hide any part of its inner workings from you. It predates graphical user interfaces and almost all common computing standards we now take for granted. But more on that later.Įmacs is more than forty years old. You’ll also have to contend with a radically different way of thinking about how you interact with text. No wonder so many people find it difficult to get their footing and opt for simpler editors.īut learning Emacs is more than just memorizing key bindings and commands. Emacs is a complex beast with tens of thousands of commands and even more settings that you can customize.
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