Which emacs

Tramp is great for editing files that don't exist on your computer, and the user experience is not noticeably any different from editing a local file.

If you parse text better than you parse graphical interfaces, you'll be happy to know that you can schedule your day or life in plain text with Emacs but still get fancy notifications on your mobile device with open source Org mode viewers.

The process takes a little setup to create a convenient way to sync your agenda with your mobile device I use Git, but you could invoke Bluetooth, KDE Connect, Nextcloud, or your file synchronization tool of choice , and you have to install an Org mode viewer such as Orgzly and a Git client app on your mobile.

Once you've got your infrastructure sorted, though, the process is inherently perfectly integrated with your usual or developing, if you're a new user Emacs workflow. You can refer to your agenda easily in Emacs, make updates to your schedule, and generally stay on task. Pushing changes to your agenda is reflected on your mobile, so you can stay organized even when Emacs isn't available. Read my step-by-step guide about calendaring with Org mode and Git. There are lots of terminal emulators available.

Although the Elisp terminal emulator in Emacs isn't the greatest general-purpose one, it's got two notable advantages. Racket is an exciting emerging Lisp dialect with a dynamic programming environment, a GUI toolkit, and a passionate community. The default editor when learning Racket is DrRacket, which has a Definitions panel at the top and an Interactions panel at the bottom.

Using this setup, the user writes definitions that affect the Racket runtime. Imagine the old Logo Turtle program, but with a terminal instead of just a turtle. Emacs, being based on Lisp, makes a great integrated development environment IDE for advanced Racket coders.

It doesn't ship with Racket mode yet , but you can install Racket mode and several other helper extensions using the Emacs package installer. Then enter the package you want to install racket-mode , and press Return. Enter Racket mode with M-x racket-mode. If you're new to Racket but not to Lisp or Emacs, start with the excellent Quick introduction to Racket with pictures. You might know that Bash scripts are popular for automating and enhancing your Linux or Unix experience.

You may have heard that Python does a pretty good job of that, too. But did you know that Lisp scripts can be run in much the same way?

The most common symptom is that, when Emacs is started, the cursor changes for a second but nothing happens. If this happens to you, it is quite likely that the distribution was unpacked incorrectly.

If it is still not working, send mail to the help-gnu-emacs gnu. There have been reports in the past that some virus scanners claim that the Emacs distribution has a virus.

This is extremely unlikely if you have downloaded Emacs from the GNU FTP site or one of its mirrors and the GPG signature for it is valid and listed in the GNU keyring, unless perhaps it is a new release made in the last few days, in which case you should exercise more caution and report the problem.

Past problems seem to have been caused by virus checkers running into a buffer size limit when unpacking large tar. Anti-virus and firewall software can block Emacs from starting subprocesses and opening network connections. Most such products have an Advanced mode where they will prompt you rather than silently blocking. See Why is nothing happening when I enter shell commands? The variable wuse-full-screen-buffer controls whether Emacs uses the window size or buffer size to determine the number of lines on screen.

Normally the window size is correct, but when running Emacs over some telnet servers, the buffer size needs to be used. Emacs tries to guess the correct value at startup, but if it guesses wrong, you can customize that variable yourself. Emacs assigns bindings assuming a three button mouse. On Windows, if a two button mouse is detected, a hack is enabled which lets you simulate the third button by pressing both mouse buttons simultaneously.

You can check how many buttons Emacs thinks your mouse has with C-h v wnum-mouse-buttons. If you find yourself needing the mouse-3 bindings more often than mouse-2, you can swap the buttons with the following code in your init file:.

If you attempt to cut and paste text with NUL characters embedded in it, then the text will be truncated at the first NUL character. This is a limitation of the Windows clipboard, and does not affect killing and yanking from the kill-ring within Emacs.

You can try set-selection-coding-system , but generally such corruption is a thing of the past, as Emacs uses Unicode for the clipboard by default now. You can use the function set-message-beep to change the sound that Emacs uses for its beep. This affects both console and GUI frames. The doc string contains a list of the system sounds you can use.

Former maintainer Andrew Innes wrote this explanation of what each field in the font string means and how Emacs treated them back in Since then, multilingual support and a redisplay overhaul to support variable width fonts have changed things slightly; more character sets are recognized and the old pseudo character sets are deprecated , and the resolution fields are used to calculate the difference between point and pixel sizes, but normally you should leave these at the system default.

The foundry field is also populated with an indication of whether the font is outline. ATM or raster. FON based when fonts are listed, which may let you differentiate between two fonts with the same name and different technologies.

Starting with Emacs 23, the preferred font name format will be moving to the simpler and more flexible fontconfig format. XLFD names will continue to be supported for backward compatibility.

The command line options and frame-parameters for changing the default font in Emacs are documented in the manual. Fonts can also be used when defining faces, though family and size are generally specified individually there. In addition, Emacs on Windows reads the registry to find X Resources. This is also documented in the manual. Emacs will only use the italic and bold versions of a font automatically if it has the same width as the normal version. Many fonts have italic and bold versions that are slightly wider.

It will also only use real bold and italic fonts by default, where other applications may use synthesized variations that are derived from the normal font. To enable more italic and bold fonts to be displayed, you can enable synthesized fonts and manually set the font for italic, bold and bold-italic as follows:. The wenable-synthesized-fonts variable is obsolete starting from Emacs See How do I use bdf fonts with Emacs? For many languages, native truetype fonts are sufficient, and in Emacs 23 the need for BDF fonts will disappear for almost all languages.

At the time of writing, all supported characters are able to be displayed with appropriate truetype or opentype fonts. Recent versions of Emacs display a large range of characters out of the box, but if you are having problems with a particular character set which you know you have fonts for, you can try defining a new fontset with create-fontset-from-ascii-font or create-fontset-from-fontset-spec. The GNU Unifont project contains glyphs for most of the Unicode codespace, and can be downloaded from ftp.

You probably only need to do this on the non-Unicode versions of Windows 95, 98 and ME , and even then, various Windows and Internet Explorer updates have made third party software unnecessary in most cases.

If you are having trouble displaying text, try defining a fontset with the font for the languages that the third party software handles set to what that software expects which may not be an appropriate font for that language, but the third party software is intercepting it and using a different font behind the scenes.

See Non-latin display. Normally Emacs should initialize locale-coding-system appropriately based on your locale, which will let Emacs use font names in your local language successfully. Up: Font menu [ Contents ][ Index ]. If you have set wuse-wfont-dialog to nil , you can add fonts to the font menu by changing wfixed-font-alist. For example:. For a discussion of this issue, take a look at this collection of email messages on the topic.

For existing files, Emacs scans the file to determine the line ending convention as part of the same scan it does to determine the file encoding.

It does this to be safe, as no data loss will occur if the file is really binary and the Ctrl-M characters are significant. The list can be manipulated with the functions add-untranslated-filesystem and remove-untranslated-filesystem. With auto-detection in recent versions of Emacs, this is seldom useful for existing files, but can still be used to influence the choice of line ends for newly created files.

A lot of effort has gone into making it easier to print from Emacs on MS Windows, but this has still been insufficient to keep up with changes in printing technology from text and postscript based printers connected via ports that can be accessed directly, to graphical printers that are only accessible via USB.

The quoting rules for native Windows shells and Cygwin shells have some subtle differences. When Emacs spawns subprocesses, it tries to determine whether the process is a Cygwin program and changes its quoting mechanism appropriately.

Programs that explicitly use a handle to the console CON or CON: instead of stdin and stdout cannot be used as subprocesses to Emacs, and they will also not work in shell-mode.

The default ftp client on Windows is an example of such a program - this ftp program is mostly fine for use with ange-ftp or tramp , but not for M-x ftp see How do I use FTP within Emacs. There is no convenient way for either Emacs or any shell used in shell-mode to redirect the input and output of such processes from the console to input and output pipes.

The only workaround is to use a different implementation of the program that does not use the console directly. You may notice that some programs, when run in a shell in shell-mode , have their output buffered e. The same can happen in other subprocesses that themselves run other programs as subprocesses, for example when using cvs from Emacs, which is itself configured to use ssh , password prompts fail to appear when expected, and cvs appears to hang.

Although it may at first seem like the shell is buffering the output from the program, it is actually the program that is buffering output. The C runtime typically decides how to buffer output based upon whether stdout is bound to a handle to a console window or not.

If bound to a console window, output is buffered line by line; if bound to a block device, such as a file, output is buffered block by block.

In a shell buffer, stdout is a pipe handle and so is buffered in blocks. If you would like the buffering behavior of your program to behave differently, the program itself is going to have to be changed; you can use setbuf and setvbuf to manipulate the buffering semantics.

Some programs handle this by having an explicit flag to control their buffering behavior, typically -i for interactive, or by a special environment variable. Up: Subprocess buffering [ Contents ][ Index ]. If you are finding the 16 bit DOS subprocesses cause your A: drive to be accessed, hanging Emacs until the read times out if there is no floppy in the drive, check to see if your virus software is causing the problem.

Emacs cannot guarantee that a subprocess gets killed on Windows 95 and its descendants, and it is a difficult limitation to work around. The terms are pretty far off the beaten path and seem odd, but there is a logic to them that is both compelling and charming.

To me, Emacs feels like the future rather than the past. Just as the lugged steel frame will be useful and comfortable in decades to come and the carbon fiber wunderbike will be in a landfill, having shattered on impact, so will Emacs persist as a useful tool when the latest trendy app is long forgotten.

If the notion of building your own personal working environment by editing Lisp code and having that fits-like-a-glove environment follow you to any computer is appealing to you, you may really like Emacs. If you like the new and shiny and want to get straight to work without much investment of time and mental cycles, it's likely not for you.

I don't write code any more other than Ludwig and Emacs Lisp , but many of the engineers at Fugue use Emacs to good effect. I also hope to provide you with enough detail that you can have a successful experience with it, without hours of Googling. The long-term advantages that come with using Emacs just make life easier. The net gain makes the initial lift entirely worthwhile.

Consider these:. Org Mode alone is worth investing some serious time in, but if you are like me, you are usually working on a dozen or so documents—from blog posts to lists of what you need to do for a conference to employee reviews.

In the modern world of computing, this generally means using several applications, all of which have distracting user interfaces and different ways to store, sort, and search. The result is that you need to constantly switch mental contexts and remember minutiae. I hate context switching because it is an imposition put on me due to a broken interface model 2 and I hate having to remember things my computer should remember for me in any rational world.

In providing a single environment, Emacs is even more powerful for the PHB than the programmer, since programmers tend to spend a greater percentage of their day in a single application. Switching mental contexts has a higher cost than is often apparent.

OS and application vendors have tarted up interfaces to distract us from this reality. Many applications can be full screened all day and used to edit text. Emacs is singular because it is both an editor and a Lisp interpreter.

In essence, you have a Turing complete machine a keystroke or two away at all times, while you go about your business. If you know a little or a lot about programming, you'll recognize that this means you can do anything in Emacs. The full power of your computer is available to you in near real time while you work, once you have the commands in memory.

You won't want to re-create Excel in eLisp, but most things you might do in Excel are smaller in scope and easy to accomplish in a line or two of code. If I need to crunch numbers, I'm more likely to jump over to the scratch buffer and write a little code than open a spreadsheet. Even if I have an email to write that isn't a one-liner, I'll usually just write it in Emacs and paste it into my email client. Why context switch when you can just flow?

You might start with a simple calculation or two, but, over time, anything you need computed can be added with relative ease to Emacs. This is perhaps unique in applications that also provide rich features for creating things for other humans.

Remember those magical terminals in Isaac Asimov's books? Emacs is the closest thing I've encountered to them. Instead, I just work. There is real power and efficiency to having a great tool and committing to it. Having a community of people making all manner of useful additions? Having the full power of Lisp a keychord away? I have a dual monitor set up at my desk. One of them is in portrait mode with Emacs full screened all day long.

The other one has web browsers for researching and reading; it usually has a terminal open as well. I keep my calendar, email, etc. This allows me to actually concentrate on what I'm doing. I've found eliminating distractions to be almost impossible in the more modern UI applications due to their efforts to be helpful and easy to use. I don't need to be constantly reminded how to do operations I've done tens of thousands of times, but I do need a nice, clean white sheet of paper to be thoughtful.

See what it's like to have some actual peace and quiet in your computing environment. Of course, lots of apps now have modes that hide the interface and, thankfully, both Apple and Microsoft now have meaningful full-screen modes. Unless you are writing code all day or perhaps working on a very long document like a book, you're still going to face the noise of other apps. Also, most modern applications seem simultaneously patronizing and lacking in functionality and usability.

But what about communicating? The difference between creating and communicating is substantial. I'm much more productive at both when I set aside distinct time for each. We use Slack at Fugue, which is both wonderful and hellish.

I keep it on a messaging desktop alongside my calendar and email, so that, while I'm actually making things, I'm blissfully unaware of all the chatter in the world. It takes just one Slackstorm or an email from a VC or Board Director to immediately throw me out of my work. But, most things can usually wait an hour or two. The third reason I find Emacs more advantageous than other environments is that it's easy to take all your stuff with you.

By this, I mean that, rather than having a plethora of apps interacting and syncing in their own ways, all you need is one or two directories syncing via Dropbox or the like. Then, you can have all your work follow you anywhere in the environment you have crafted to suit your purposes.

It's dead simple and reliable. In Also, Further, menu options seem to move around rather regularly. If you use the menus, either through X or the text interface, you may find the menu options we discuss on a different menu.

Feel free to send questions or comments to deb oreilly.