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masinick
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Joined: 03 Apr 2025
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Location: Concord, NH
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 Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2025 5:52 am Post subject: Introduction to Emacs |
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| Quote: | | Emacs is an editor that is sufficiently powerful that many users open an Emacs session soon after turning their computer on and leave it open for the duration of their computing endeavor. If you plan to have Emacs running for an extended time, it is helpful to run Emacs in the background so that the command line becomes available for another command. |
| Quote: | Emacs has major modes for editing a variety of common and not-so-common file types, such as plain text, shell scripts, python language scripts, and so on. Each mode redefines the effect of hitting the tab key, for example, to do the most appropriate thing for a particular file type. These modes will start automatically for many types of files, based on the file extension or the first line in the file.
Emacs is extensible. You can program it to behave as you like, for example by using the inbuilt, easy to learn scripting language Emacs Lisp. See the Emacs documentation for more about this.
Emacs is well documented in free sources. Type info emacs at the command line (or C-h r from within Emacs) to read the full official documentation. There is also an abbreviated manual page (type man emacs at the command line). For beginners, the best way to start learning Emacs is the inbuilt interactive tutorial mentioned above. |
You can read more about the basics of Emacs at en.flossmanuals.net |
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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn
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Joined: 18 Jul 2025
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Location: South Portland, Maine, USA, Earth, Sol System
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2025 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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ahh... emacs i remember yee fondly:
http://xkcd.com/378/
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masinick
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Joined: 03 Apr 2025
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Location: Concord, NH
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2025 8:41 pm Post subject: Thanks for the laugh; I try to use the tools to meet needs |
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Ha ha, good ones, classic jabs at all the silly fighting about the great number of wonderful tools that we have!
I have not been using GNU Emacs a lot lately, not because I don't like it, but because I have not had the need. Lately I've been using mostly the ultra easy, basic Leafpad notebook style editor, because all I have been doing are really small, simple edits with some copying and pasting.
On Windows, I've been using Barry's Emacs instead of GNU Emacs because Barry's Emacs has a lot of Windows-centric features built in; for example, the Windows implementation of Barry's Emacs uses the same Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V conventions as are common clipboard selection shortcuts. You can set that up with GNU Emacs and Vim, too, but it comes stock in Barry's Emacs (and Leafpad too).
I'm not an editor bigot; I like using the tool that suits the need. When working on a large project, I am most likely to use GNU Emacs. When doing a lot of searching, I am also likely to use Emacs. However, when I have one or two things to change across a large file I will use vi, and if I have lots of the same thing to change in many files, I will write a short bash loop and create a change file, which I pull into ed - I've changed 50-100 files with a few simple changes in seconds using ed and a short bash loop. I've used sed, too, but for the kinds of things I've run into, ed with bash did what I wanted rapidly. More modern guys probably would have written a Perl, Python, or Gawk script (I've tinkered with that too), but small, simple, connected tools sometimes work; it all depends on the situation. |
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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn
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Joined: 18 Jul 2025
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Location: South Portland, Maine, USA, Earth, Sol System
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| Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2025 1:28 am Post subject: |
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with the exception of cat i've used all of those editors listed in the comic.
and i've used cat if you count the old dos command `copy con [file]`
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masinick
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Joined: 03 Apr 2025
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Location: Concord, NH
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| Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2025 1:48 am Post subject: |
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I've used both cat and echo as "editors" for one liners!  |
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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn
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Joined: 18 Jul 2025
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Location: South Portland, Maine, USA, Earth, Sol System
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| Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2025 2:00 am Post subject: |
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i use echo all the time for that. forgot about that one. i usually use it to append a line to a file.
`echo "=app-emulation/virtualbox-ose-2.2.4 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords`
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inactive
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Joined: 29 Aug 2025
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| Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2025 3:23 am Post subject: |
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I saw that thought I was gonna die laughing...
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Lord.DragonFly.of.Dawn
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| Posted: Sun Jun 07, 2025 1:48 am Post subject: |
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| glad to have been of service.
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