Emacs and Xemacs

The native UNIX general purpose editors are ed - a line editor and vi (visual editor) - a screen editor. Other modern editors have been made available in the Fermi UNIX environment.

We strongly recommend emacs/xemacs for your editing applications. Efforts are being made to further customize emacs for D0.

emacs

emacs is a public domain software package that is available for both vms and unix systems. It has very powerful features (most of the functionalities in EVE and many others) and is customizable. emacs can be used in both X and ascii modes. It has extensive interactive help facility. For a first time user (Ctrl-h)-t gives a good tutorial. You can also obtain the GNU Emacs reference card which gives a summary of the keyboard versions of the commands. The emacs screen has pull-down menus with commands.

To setup emacs you type,
% setup emacs

To invoke the emacs editor, type,
%emacs [options] filename

If you do not have X-window capability or do not want to open a new window for the editor, you can invoke emacs on the same window by typing
%emacs -nw [options] filename

Some important emacs keyboard commands are listed below: (C stands for Ctrl, M stands for Meta (Ctrl-[ in some cases))

 C-h           enter on-line help
 C-h t         help tutorial for beginners
 C-x b         change buffer
 C-f           move forward by a character
 C-b           move backward by a character
 C-p           move to previous line
 C-n           move to next line
 C-v           move forward by one screen                   
 M-v           move backward by one screen
 M-<           go to beginning of the buffer
 M->           go to end of the buffer  
 C-s           search for string (you will be prompted)
 C-d           delete a character at the cursor
 C-k           delete/kill from cursor to end of line
 C-y           restore what you have just deleted
 C-g           abort current search
 C-x i         insert file at cursor (you will be prompted for filename
 C-x C-s       save the file
 C-x C-w       write to file(system will prompt you for filename)
 C-x C-c       exit emacs

For a more complete command set, look up EMACS Reference Card.

Some D0 extensions to emacs are available.

xemacs

xemacs is a version of emacs, compatible with and containing many improvements over GNU emacs.

To use xemacs, do %setup xemacs

To edit a file then, you can type
% xemacs filename

Almost all the commands are the same as emacs.

Last update: May 28, 1997

P.Bhat