Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours
Hour 3: Getting Started with Emacs
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Hour 3: Getting Started with Emacs |
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As you saw in Figure 3.1 and 3.2, Emacs has menus at the top of the screen with lots of functions available. The content of the menus differs from GNU Emacs to XEmacs.
It would not make much sense to tell you about all the functions in the menus at this point, because I've yet to describe many of the available functions. I will, however, shortly describe what you can find in the different menu items. The menus are not in every case called by the same name, so the following list begins with the GNU Emacs menu name, and then introduces XEmacs name:
Buffers-- This contains a list of all the buffers available. Selecting one from the list changes your view to this buffer (Your current buffer isn't removed, it is hidden. You can later get back to it by selecting it from this list). In Hour 6, "Editing Several Files at Once," multiple buffers will be described in detail.
Files, File-- This entry contains functions for opening, saving, and killing files and for splitting windows (that is, showing two or more files in the Emacs window). In XEmacs it also contains functions for printing.
Edit and Search, Edit-- The Edit menu in XEmacs contains almost the same information as the Edit and Search menus in GNU Emacs. The menus contain Cut, Paste, Undo, and Spell-check. The XEmacs Edit menu contains search functions, whereas this is located in the Search menu of GNU Emacs. In XEmacs, functions for recording and playing macros are also located in the Edit menu.
Tools, Tools and Apps-- The Tools menu in GNU Emacs is split into two menus in XEmacs, namely Tools and Apps. The menus contain an entrance to auxiliary functions. Examples of these are functions for searching for text in multiple files located on the disk (the UNIX command grep), functions for reading and sending mail and news, functions for compiling and debugging programs, and functions for finding the difference between files.
Help-- This menu contains functions for searching for extra help on Emacs and other programs. This includes the info pages, a man page browser, searching through built-in functions, and a FAQ (frequently asked questions) file.
Options-- XEmacs contains a menu entry called Options from which much information can be configured. A few configuration options are available in GNU Emacs from a Help submenu called Options.
Mule-- In version 20 of Emacs multicharacter language support has been added. This is of interest only if you need to write in Japanese, Chinese, or Russian. In the menu entry Mule, information for this is available.
Some of the menu items are grayed out to indicate that the item is not available at the moment. An example of this might be the Copy entry which would copy text to the clipboard. This entry would be grayed out when no text is marked.
Tip - To find out what a given menu entry does, try pressing C-h k (describe-key) and select the menu entry. |
If you, for some reason, are using Emacs on a character-based terminal instead of X Window, the menus are still available. This time, however, you can't access them with the mouse. Instead you must press the escape key, release it, and press the backtick key (').
Tip - If you want to try this out, you can start GNU Emacs with the option -nw. |
Caution - Please note that menus are not available when running XEmacs on a terminal display. |
In Figure 3.3, you can see Emacs when M-´ has been pressed. To navigate the menus, press the letter of the menu item (for example, E to enter the Edit menu). Unfortunately, it's impossible to back up in the menus. If you change your mind, simply press the escape key three times. (This is a universal oops-what-have-I-done key, which tells Emacs to abort what you've told it to start.)
Figure
3.3
The non-X Window
version of GNU Emacs.
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Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours |
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Hour 3: Getting Started with Emacs |
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