What's Emacs ?
Emacs is
the text editor. Don't look elsewhere, Emacs does
everything you use to do with your favourite text editor ... and even
more. Emacs does not perform only text edition, it provides a log of
very handy tools, such as a directory browser very well written
(dired), an interactive interface to diff (ediff), an automatic spell
checking tool (flyspell), an integrated compilation environment and
much much more.
The above picture is an icon to put proudly on webpages made with
Emacs. For a bigger version of the photo that enlightens this page,
click here (
XCF source, 340K).
Documentation
I began to write a semi-famous documentation in French on Emacs. Only
the two first parts are finished.
Modules
Emacs is partly written in Lisp, which allows you to write extension
modules or to configure it to your very specific needs. Here are some
modules I wrote for various reasons:
-
guess-lang.el
, a
module that automagically guess the language of a buffer, very handy
to integrate with spell checking for example. It currently support
English, Danish, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Norwegian,
Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and you can add languages by
yourself.;
-
workbone.el
, a CD
player (yes, a CD player!) for GNU Emacs (use workbone with cddb
support);
-
egocentric.el
, a
module to highlight occurences of your name and/or other words in
arbitrary buffers. Handy to quickly read mails and not to miss any
parts they talk about you ;-);
-
tail.el
, a module that
use tail on a file, to see its progress (autorevert does not the job
properly);
-
pong.el
,
a Lisp implementation of the cult game pong;
-
fortune.el
, a tool
to manage and maintain a fortune file;
-
signature.el
, a
snippet that insert random fortune at the bottom of your mails (in
fact, other pieces of code already does the job in Emacs);
-
under.el
, underline a
region with "^" chars, very handy to quote a word in mails;
-
df.el
, a program that
displays space left on various devices, to be sure not to loose data
because of a disk full.
