What is Emacs?

Emacs is one of the oldest text editors out there. Together with Vim, they are the best ways to manipulate text.

However, Emacs is so much more. Under the hood it rocks the amazing Emacs Lisp language, which can be easily used to adjust virtually any aspect of Emacs to your liking. This also allowed Emacs to evolve into the de facto shell we use. You can use it as file manager (dired), as music player (emms), internet browser (eww), email client (mu4e), RSS reader (elfeed), terminal client (eshell), and so much more. It also is the place where org-mode lives, the single best way to organize your life.

Emacs
Emacs [source]

GNU Emacs

Emacs is am old program, which was rewritten multiple times. Currently, the most popular version is GNU Emacs available under GPL License.

It is free program - which means that only you don’t need to pay for it, but you are free to modify and redistiribute it. In fact, you are encouraged to.

Current emacs version: 29.2 (2024-01-18). New version is released every few months.

Getting Emacs

Emacs is available on most platforms - Linux, BSD, Mac, even Windows. Simply download the version for your OS from the official website or, even better, compile it from source.

It is also available in all good package managers (pacman, pkg, apt, brew, and so on)

Evil Mode

There is a joke, that Emacs is a great operating system, but it lacks a decent text editor. If you are afraid of using keyboard shortcuts like “ctrl-x ctrl-s” just to save file, you can install the best Vim mode out there - Evil Mode. It supports all the keys and most of the ex-commands.

My Guides [rss]

I wrote a few guides you may find interesting

My Varia [rss]

Emacs is also a way of life. You can read my general emacs-related ramblings here:

Emacs on the Web

EmacsConf

Every year there is a conference for Emacs users:

Date of the next EmacsConf: TBD.

Other distributions

*While Gnu Emacs is wonderful, it requires significant time and effort to make it friendly. A lot of people are not fans of the default configurations. If you are one of them, you may instead try some ready Emacs distributions, like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs.