Presentation about Emacs done at Master on Free Software 2009 Edition

1. Emacs
Juan A. Suárez Romero
Master on Free Software

2. List of topics
● Debate about editors
● Emacs state of art
● Emacs concepts and terms
● Working with emacs
● Common use modes
● Emacs Lisp
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3. Introduction
● What work do you usually do?
● Thinking about usual tasks for a hacker
● What do you usually do in your daily
work? Or what tasks do you guess you
are going to do?
● Tip: reading/editing text and "using" it for
different purposes (code, emails,
documentation, etc.)
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4. Introduction (II)
"The editor should be an extension of your hand: make
sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and
programmable." The Pragmatic Programmer
● If you are a hacker you are going to
handle code most of the time, you have
to choose a tool that improves your
performance
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5. Emacs: text editor? ;-)
● It is the tool chosen by a lot of smart
developers
● History, is was one of the first
applications of the free software
movement, there was commercial
versions in the beginning though
● It stands for "Editing Macros", rumour
has it that it is a play on some Stallman
ice cream store
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6. Emacs: text editor? ;-) (II)
● The truth is that it is a Lisp interpreter
that allows you to edit text, among many
other things
● Editors wars
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7. Emacs concepts, terms and
initial contact
● use the refcard
http://marc-abramowitz.com/download/emacs_22_reference_card.pdf
● meta key (M), control key (C)
● file, buffer, frame and window
● modes: major and minor
● movement commands
● mark and point
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8. Emacs concepts, terms and
initial contact (II)
● you do not cut, you kill, and you do not
paste, you yank ;-)
● functions and key bindings
● undo
● cancel commands
● search and replace
● configure .emacs
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9. Emacs concepts, terms and
initial contact (III)
● obtaining help
● macros, powerful and easy to use way to
repeat series of commands
● define macros
● use last macro
● you can name it, save it and bind it to key
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10. Interesting modes (C-h m)
● Text mode
● C mode
● Compile mode
● GUD mode
● shell modes
● Cscope / ECB
● VC mode
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11. References
● http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
● http://www.emacswiki.org/
● Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition, by
Debra Cameron (Author), James Elliott
(Author), Marc Loy (Author), Eric
Raymond (Author), Bill Rosenblatt
(Author)
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12. Acknowledgments
● Alejandro García Castro
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