Emacs has an extensive interactive help facility, but the facility assumes that you know how to manipulate Emacs windows and buffers. CTRL-h (backspace or CTRL-h) enters the Help facility. Help Tutorial (CTRL-h t) requests an interactive tutorial which can teach beginners the fundamentals of Emacs in a few minutes. Help Apropos (CTRL-h a) helps you find a command given its functionality, Help Character (CTRL-h c) describes a given character's effect, and Help Function (CTRL-h f) describes a given Lisp function specified by name.
Emacs's Undo can undo several steps of modification to your buffers, so it is easy to recover from editing mistakes.
GNU Emacs's many special packages handle mail reading (RMail) and sending (Mail), outline editing (Outline), compiling (Compile), running subshells within Emacs windows (Shell), running a Lisp read-eval-print loop (Lisp-Interaction-Mode), and automated psychotherapy (Doctor).
There is an extensive reference manual, but users of other Emacses should have little trouble adapting even without a copy. Users new to Emacs will be able to use basic features fairly rapidly by studying the tutorial and using the self-documentation features.
Emacs Options
The following options are of general interest:
The following options are lisp-oriented (these options are processed in the order encountered):
The following options are useful when running Emacs as a batch editor:
Using Emacs with X
Emacs has been tailored to work well with the X window system. To enable this feature, you must define the macro HAVE_X_WINDOWS in the file src/config.h before compiling Emacs. If you run Emacs from under X windows, it will create its own X window to display in. You will probably want to start the editor as a background process so that you can continue using your original window. To use the optional X Menu features, define also the macro HAVE_X_MENU. This macro is separate from HAVE_X_WINDOWS because the Menu facility of X does not work on all the systems that support X. Emacs can be started with the following X switches:
When you specify a font, do not include the .onx extension. Be sure to put a space between the -font switch and the font specification argument.
You can set X default values for your Emacs windows in your .Xdefaults file. Use the following format:
where value specifies the default value of keyword. Emacs lets you set default values for the following keywords:
If you try to set color values while using a black and white display, the window's characteristics will default as follows: the foreground color will be set to black, the background color will be set to white, the border color will be set to grey, and the text and mouse cursors will be set to black.
The following lists the key bindings for the mouse cursor when used in an Emacs window.
MOUSE BUTTON FUNCTION
left set mark
middle set cursor
right select (Emacs) window
SHIFT-middle put text into X cut buffer (cut text)
SHIFT-right paste text
CTRL-middle cut text and kill it
CTRL-right select this window, then split it into
two windows
CTRL-SHIFT-left X buffer menu--hold the buttons and keys
down, wait for menu to appear, select
buffer, and release. Move mouse out of
menu and release to cancel.
CTRL-SHIFT-middle X help menu--pop up index card menu for
Emacs help.
CTRL-SHIFT-right Select window with mouse, and delete all
other windows. Same as typing
CTRL-x 1.
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Your local Emacs maintainer might also have copies available. As
with all software and publications from FSF, everyone is permitted to
make and distribute copies of the Emacs manual. The TeX source to the
manual is also included in the Emacs source distribution.
/usr/local/emacs/lisp - Lisp source files and compiled files
that define most editing commands. Some are preloaded;
others are autoloaded from this directory when used.
/usr/local/emacs/man - sources for the Emacs reference manual.
/usr/local/emacs/etc - various programs that are used with GNU Emacs, and some files of information.
/usr/local/emacs/etc/DOC.* - contains the documentation strings for the Lisp primitives and preloaded Lisp functions of GNU Emacs. They are stored here to reduce the size of Emacs proper.
/usr/local/emacs/etc/DIFF discusses GNU Emacs vs. Twenex Emacs;
/usr/local/emacs/etc/CCADIFF discusses GNU Emacs vs. CCA Emacs;
/usr/local/emacs/etc/GOSDIFF discusses GNU Emacs vs. Gosling Emacs.
/usr/local/emacs/etc/SERVICE lists people offering various services
to assist users of GNU Emacs, including education, troubleshooting,
porting and customization.
These files also have information useful to anyone wishing to write
programs in the Emacs Lisp extension language, which has not yet been fully
documented.
/usr/local/emacs/info - files for the Info documentation browser (a subsystem of Emacs) to refer to. Currently not much of Unix is documented here, but the complete text of the Emacs reference manual is included in a convenient tree structured form.
/usr/local/emacs/lock - holds lock files that are made for all files being modified in Emacs, to prevent simultaneous modification of one file by two users.
/usr/local/emacs/cpp - the GNU cpp, needed for building Emacs on certain versions of Unix where the standard cpp cannot handle long names for macros.
/usr/local/emacs/shortnames - facilities for translating long names to short names in C code, needed for building Emacs on certain versions of Unix where the C compiler cannot handle long names for functions or variables.
Do not expect a personal answer to a bug report. The purpose of reporting bugs is to get them fixed for everyone in the next release, if possible. For personal assistance, look in the SERVICE file (see above) for a list of people who offer it.
Please do not send anything but bug reports to this mailing list. Send requests to be added to mailing lists to the special list info-gnu-emacs-request@prep.ai.mit.edu (or the corresponding UUCP address). For more information about Emacs mailing lists, see the file /usr/local/emacs/etc/MAILINGLISTS. Bugs tend actually to be fixed if they can be isolated, so it is in your interest to report them in such a way that they can be easily reproduced.
Bugs that I know about are: shell will not work with programs running in Raw mode on some Unix versions.
Emacs is free; anyone may redistribute copies of Emacs to anyone under the terms stated in the Emacs General Public License, a copy of which accompanies each copy of Emacs and which also appears in the reference manual.
Copies of Emacs may sometimes be received packaged with distributions of Unix systems, but it is never included in the scope of any license covering those systems. Such inclusion violates the terms on which distribution is permitted. In fact, the primary purpose of the General Public License is to prohibit anyone from attaching any other restrictions to redistribution of Emacs.
Richard Stallman encourages you to improve and extend Emacs, and urges that you contribute your extensions to the GNU library. Eventually GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) will be a complete replacement for Berkeley Unix. Everyone will be able to use the GNU system for free.
Emacs was written by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Joachim Martillo and Robert Krawitz added the X features.