Being Productive With Emacs

Phil Sung <psung@alum.mit.edu>

Emacs is a text editor which is far more powerful than most of its users realize. It can be (1) customized extensively to suit one's needs, (2) automated to save time and reduce tedium, and (3) extended to do virtually anything. Although Emacs can seem intimidating to beginners, the investment of learning it pays for itself many times over in increased productivity.

These two slide decks (HTML) are from a class I taught in January 2009 during MIT's Independent Activities Period:

• Introduction: why Emacs?; overview of editing commands; macros; major and minor modes.
• Emacs lisp: rebinding keys; hooks; extending Emacs with your own commands.

The Guided Tour of Emacs is a longer and more thorough document (in prose!) that overlaps with material from the first set of slides above.

Additional information

Installation guide: Emacs installation instructions for various platforms.

I've collected a page of additional Emacs resources.

Slides from the 2007 version of the class are available: ODP, PDF; ODP, PDF; ODP, PDF.

Useful links:

• GNU Emacs home page
• Emacs printable reference card
• Emacs manual
• Intro to elisp
• Emacs lisp manual
• XEmacs home page

Special thanks to Piaw Na and Arthur Gleckler for their help in preparing this material, and to SIPB for sponsoring this class. Read the original announcement for the class.

Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation or Phil Sung. You may use any of the material under http://web.psung.name/emacs/ under the terms of the GFDL v1.3+ or the GPL v3+:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this work under the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.3 or (at your option) any later version published by the Free Software Foundation, with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts; or the GNU General Public License, version 3 or (at your option) any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.