Emacs

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Emacs is a famous text editor, famous by its flexibility and extensibility. One manual describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor".

This page is designed to give users a good place to share their config and settings for a nice emacs setup.

installing emacs

emerge -avt emacs

for the standard gnu emacs and

emerge -avt xemacs

for the 1980 created fork of emacs, both should handle the same, while emacs on its own stands here for both. If you install additional extensions for both you might need to add app-emacs or app-xemacs to the package as there are two different versions for both.

What emacs is and what it is not

(X)Emacs is primarily a text editor and not a word processor, it concentrates on manipulating any kind of text, rather than manipulating the font and look. It is client and GUI based, so can be used on local box in graphical environments with a GUI and remote on a server in a client mode. (X)Emacs provides commands for manipulate every kind of text and syntax highlighting.

Customizability

(X)Emacs is highly customizable in many ways through:

• the customize extension, which allows settings of customized variables, such as color themes, graphical interface, etc. This part is intended for emacs beginners, who do not want to work with Emacs lisp code.
• combine keystrokes to execute complex makros.
• using Emacs Lisp. Designed for the emacs professional.

Extensibility

As a result of the above points, (X)Emacs behaviour can be easily definied to all text behavings without limit. Like some of the examples below show you:

• AUCTeX, A suite for LaTeX and other TeX versions,
• ERC, A Emacs IRC client,
• ORG-mode, A Emacs PIM and Orga tool
• Wanderlust, A highly flexible Mail tool for Emacs