Introduction

EMACS is a totally customizable, self documenting editor that was developed in the mid-seventies by Richard M. Stallman (rms) at MIT. Because of its extreme flexibility and power it quickly became the editor of choice at a large number of college and university computing centers. Over the past two decades EMACS has grown and changed to adapt to the needs of programmers worldwide. The most popular of the many versions of EMACS is known as GNU-Emacs, and is freely distributed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). GNU-Emacs is currently at version 18.58, and that is the version that has been ported to the Atari ST/TT, and is described in this document. From this point on EMACS will refer to the Atari ST/TT port of GNU-Emacs 18.58. (See the section on changes from previous versions, mainly version 18.57)

EMACS allows simple editing of files, and much more. One can simultaneously edit several files, each in separate windows, manipulate characters, words, lines, and paragraphs all with relative ease. EMACS also has custom modes that enable programmers to edit text files containing source code written in any of the more popular programming languages in a language sensitive manner. It allows the programmer the flexibility of compiling programs without leaving the editor, and of having compiler error messages appear, along with the corresponding source code to a program currently under development, in a split window environment. If all this is not enough EMACS allows the user almost infinite flexibility in defining new modes and commands to customize the editor in any way that one desires. It should be made clear that, in general, this is not a skill that one can learn overnight. While the basics of editing in EMACS (it comes with a tutorial) can be mastered rather quickly, the advanced features and the customization of EMACS requires serious study of the editor.