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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