GNU Emacs Manual

by Richard M. Stallman

GNU Emacs is much more than a text editor; over the years it has expanded into an entire work flow environment. Programmers are impressed by its integrated debugging and project management features. Emacs is also a multi-lingual text editor, can handle all your email and Usenet news needs, display web pages, and even has a diary and a calendar for your appointments. When you tire of all the work you can accomplish with it, Emacs contains games to play.

Features include:

Special editing modes for 25 programming languages including Java, Perl, C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Lisp, Scheme, and Pascal.
Special scripting language modes for Bash, other common shells, and creating Makefiles for GNU/Linux, Unix, Windows/DOS and VMS systems
Support for typing and displaying in 21 non-English languages, including Chinese, Czech, Hindi, Hebrew, Russian, Vietnamese, and all Western European languages
Creates Postscript output from plain text files and has special editing modes for LaTeX and TeX
Compile and debug from inside Emacs
Maintain extensive ChangeLogs
Extensive file merge and diff functions
Directory navigation: flag, move, and delete files and sub-directories recursively
Run shell commands from inside Emacs, or even use Emacs as a shell itself (Eshell)
Version control management for release and beta versions, with CVS and RCS integration.
And much more!
This book picks up where the introductory on-line tutorial, available in several languages, included with Emacs, ends. It explains the full range of Emacs' power and contains reference material useful to expert users. Appendices with specific material for Macintosh and Microsoft OS users are included

627 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important.

That is why, since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

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Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty sure I could be considered to have read this twice by now.