Emacs or: How I stopped worrying and started using "meta" key

After installing ubuntu on my notebook lately, I decided to begin using software that I always despised. Unbelievably, first target on my list was a text editor. A text editor! How can someone hate using a text editor? I did. Its name was emacs. 

Downloading and installing latest version of emacs was a piece of cake, since emacs was available via Ubuntu Software Centre. With all my arsenals ready, akin to a real Jedi; I commenced my quest to explore emacs. Although there are numerous open-source text editors available, I chose emacs since it has a large user base (and hence many communities of programmers as well as hackers, willing to help me out in using it). Emacs and vi happen to be adversaries in the so called “editor war”, a term ascribed to the long-going tussle between the users of the two editors. Aficionados of either software never forsake any opportunity to show that their program's editing capability is flawless in every possible way (of course an exaggeration, we are far away from any such utopia, if it exists!).

Which is best among equals? A never ending debate.

 Well, frankly vi (as well as vim a.k.a. vi improved) is light-weight and fast as compared to emacs. Still, extensive range of shortcut keys in emacs makes it a handy tool to deal with data. Infact, due to its obscure shortcuts, vi saviors often ridicule emacs by presenting EMACS as acronym for "Elsewhere Maybe All Commands Simple". Though, emacs is associated with a complex learning curve as shown below, it pays-off all the time and energy invested in learning it, when you actually put its features into practice.

No matter what haters say, the fact remains that emacs is an effective tool for those who deal in copious amounts of data. One of the reason why most people find it difficult to acquaint themselves with emacs is that it has too many shortcut keys which are sometimes fussy. To make things worse, emacs documentation uses parlance that is unfamiliar to newcomers from windows environment. For example: emacs documentation tells to use M-% to perform a “query-replace”. Windows users can never guess, that letter M in “M-%” is meta-key which is nothing but “alt” key on windows keyboard. On unix keyboard it is represented by [♦] key.

Unix keyboard from Sun Micosystems (meta key is encircled)

Some useful emacs shortcuts are given in following pdf document (download it, print it and keep it handy):

Mol Modelling Emacs
Several default features in emacs are quite different from regular text editors. For example, if you select some text and press delete key, the text does NOT disappear. To make this behaviour similar to other standard text manipulators, you need to alter the .emacs file in your home directory. 

For those running on linux, press C+M+t (i.e. control+alt +t in emacs lexicon) and in terminal type "emacs ~/.emacs" (without quotes)
and add the following lines to .emacs file:

The above code is written in a language called “lisp”, which emacs uses to understand its user customized behaviour. Statements followed by double semicolons (;;) are comments in lisp and will not be read by emacs. You may skip adding them.

You may consider adding the following lisp code too, to further customize emacs:

It is also possible to use emacs akin pico (i.e. within terminal). Go to terminal and type "emacs -nw" (no quotes)

 It is a good idea to make an alias named emacsx (or whatever you wish) for the command emacs -nw and place it in your ~/.bashrc file.

  
To learn more about emacs I suggest, using the website emacswiki.org, it is bible of emacs. Series of screencast by Kurt Schwehr will also be useful for beginners.

For me, learning emacs, turned out to be a breath of fresh air. Hope it will be same for you. 

Happy Editing...

(C-x C-c / Good Bye!)