GNU Emacs
is a version of
Emacs,
written by the author of the original (PDP-10)
Emacs,
Richard Stallman.
The primary documentation of GNU Emacs is in the GNU Emacs Manual,
which you can read on line using Info, a subsystem of Emacs. Please
look there for complete and up-to-date documentation. This man page
is updated only when someone volunteers to do so; the Emacs
maintainers' priority goal is to minimize the amount of time this man
page takes away from other more useful projects.
The user functionality of GNU Emacs encompasses
everything other
Emacs
editors do, and it is easily extensible since its
editing commands are written in Lisp.
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.
The following options are of general interest:
file
\+ number
Go to the line specified by
number
(do not insert a space between the "+" sign and
the number).
-q
Do not load an init file.
-u user
-t file
Use specified
file
as the terminal instead of using stdin/stdout.
This must be the first argument specified in the command line.
The following options are lisp-oriented
(these options are processed in the order encountered):
-f function
Execute the lisp function
function.
-l file
Load the lisp code in the file
file.
The following options are useful when running
Emacs
as a batch editor:
-batch
Edit in batch mode. The editor will send messages to stderr. This
option must be the first in the argument list. You must use -l and -f
options to specify files to execute and functions to call.
-kill
Exit
Emacs
while in batch mode.
