The power of Emacs

Many people do not understand why Emacs is so many users, they love Emacs so much, even some people think of it as "faith." Although I do not have this belief, but it is really good, I like to use it to edit various documents, now see what Emacs can do.

As far as I know, Emacs's capabilities include

1. Edit Text

   Emacs's ability to edit text is very strong. Many of its other functions are dependent on powerful editing capabilities. Emacs is a humanized design, it is very reliable, will not somehow break your file, with it to edit important text confidence is guaranteed.

   Maybe you start to think that its key binding is very uncomfortable to use. It has a lot of long "shortcut keys", such as pressing CTRL-H and then pressing ctrl-i ... It's really a lot slower than a key shortcut for VIM. However, the advantage of Emacs is not the frequency of keystrokes, our goal is to use a key, or even do not press the keyboard, to complete the complex and intelligent operation. In the face of Emacs, you feel like a magician with a flick of the wand and the task is done.

   Emacs has a very powerful text processing capability, whether you're dealing with natural language or machine language. Whether it is Chinese or English, whether it is a novel, HTML, or C program, Java program, I can press m-e forward a sentence (C and Java statements), press m-k Delete a word, press M-} to move a paragraph, press m-p (I set the button) to delete a word. Because Emacs knows what kind of a sentence (sentence-end), what is a paragraph (paragraph-start). And it knows what the difference is between a sentence and a paragraph in a different document.

   I just press M-q to make a line. I just have to press a key to reorder a list of numbers. I just press c-cbackspace in the HTML document can delete a group of tags, press c-c c-c I can insert a picture, press C-c C-v can immediately send this document to a Mozilla window to preview ... Press C-c c-r RET in the latex document to send the selected area of my document to LaTeX and see the effect immediately.

   Are you feeling more like a magician now? Go on!

   Emacs has a very friendly and powerful human-machine interface. You can clearly feel this advantage when searching for a replacement string. It can also perform incremental search when inputting regexp (regular expression), and has a very nice addition to some matched strings. At the time of substitution, it is unique to recursive edit, which interrupts the replacement process, edits nearby text that needs to be corrected, and then continues to replace. This feature is very important to many people because, in the replacement process, the text near the replaced text is likely to be changed because it is replaced. Look at this screenshot, which is the case of isearch entering a regular expression.

   Emacs has a very powerful spell-checking ability. You can use Flyspell to check your spelling errors at any time to see if this picture is a flyspell-mode LaTeX document, Flyspell know that some words in the paragraph are wrong, and \begin{myquotation} myquotation is considered is a user-defined LaTeX environment name and is not considered a spelling error.

   You can also use Ispell's completion function to enter the long English words you are prone to make mistakes, and look at this picture.

   Emacs's Hippie-expand can be very intelligent to complement your text, filenames, and many other things, and this function is done with the same button!

   Emacs can enter and display multi-language text, which is a truly internationalized program. Emacs can recognize a variety of natural language symbols, it can know which symbols are brackets, those are punctuation. Looking at this screenshot, Emacs shows the match of the Chinese title number. "Correct", and "Error >

   The keys of Emacs can be arbitrarily bound. You can even use the Win and Menu keys on the Windows keyboard to control it. My Win + mouse button pops up a list of all the referenced files and URLs in buffer, and when I click on them you can edit that file or open the connection in Mozilla. Look at this screenshot (Ffap-at-mouse).

   You can think of and you can't think of the editing function, Emacs can be done. Here you may also say: "This function, VI also has", "this function, UltraEdit have" ... Yes, these abilities can be a lot of other programs too. Yes, but it takes a lot less effort for an Emacs to have these features than for other programs. Many enthusiastic enthusiasts see the other editor with a cool feature, and he can find a way to add it to Emacs. Emacs can be continuously expanded. In fact, almost all of the functions you normally use are extended functions.

   Set up a small set of basic functions, and then combine all the complex functions as a combination of these basic functions. This embodies a philosophy of programming. Unlike Windows, which is also different from UNIX, it better coordinates the flexibility and identity of the program.

   The expansion of Emacs edit text is simply impossible to count. folding, narrow, outline, ... These have brought great convenience to people and have been adopted by many people.

3. editing programs

   The program is also a special text file. Because Emacs is particularly suitable for editing programs, it is especially presented here. Emacs can easily edit any type of computer language program code, and provide them with syntax highlighting, automatic indentation. You can manipulate the program's statements. For example, move down a list, delete the entire C function, ... You can rearrange many lines of comments with a single key.

   Some extensions allow you to easily browse the code, and they can recognize the semantics of the code. Lists function names, parameters and types, variable names, classes, macros, methods, defun,include files. When you edit a program, Emacs can help you complete function names, parameters, and so on. You can travel freely in the middle of the code. Look at this introduction to writing programs with Emacs.

   You can use Ediff to compare two or three files, and Emacs can place a high amount of different places, and the changed places have a particularly distinct color. I often use this feature to quickly find the location of new errors in the code I've changed. Look at the screenshot.

   With one finger you can have Emacs invoke the compiler to compile the program, list the error lists, start the debugger, and in another window show where the source code is currently executing. Look at this screenshot that Emacs is invoking the GDB debug program.

   Emacs's narrow and folding capabilities enable you to edit tens of thousands of lines of code in a file without feeling disoriented. Look at this picture, can you imagine this is part of more than 24,000 lines of TeX's source code? When you manipulate it, it's like only dozens of lines. Folding can make your very long documents fold up and see this picture is a very long page for me, I can go to one of the themes when I need to edit, when I quit the theme, the entire document will look like only one page so long. I can move my theme at will, just like moving a line.

   Add some elisp,emacs to become a code browser.

5. As an interface to other programs

   Emacs can be used as a front-end for many programs. such as w3m, Lynx Browser, MAXIMA computer algebra system, SCHEME48 and other Scheme interpreter, Shell, ... These text-mode programs have great editing capabilities once they are engaged with Emacs. Look at this picture, Scheme48 plus emacs, there is a syntax highlighting and convenient hotkey, can be very convenient to use the scheme interpreter.

7. As an operating system

   Emacs is like an operating system with an editing function, and you can do a lot of things with it. For example, read the email and newsgroups, browse the Web, manage the file directory (dired), as a Web server, remote editing files, recording schedules, appointment reminders, electronic calendars, dictionary search, ICQ Chat, put mp3, ...

9. Brewed Coffee

   If you have an automatic coffee machine in your area of work, Emacs can also help you with coffee:) Coffee.el:P

The power of Emacs