Chapter 7. Simple Text Formatting and Specialized Editing

Emacs is fundamentally a text editor, rather than a word processor: it is a tool that creates files containing exactly what you see on the screen rather than a tool that makes text files look beautiful when printed. However, Emacs does give you the capability to do the following:

• Indent text using tabs and other indentation tricks.

• Center words, lines, and paragraphs of text.

• Hide and show portions of a document using outline mode, which gives you a feel for a document's overall structure. Outline mode can make it easier to go from rough outline, to detailed outline, to rough draft, to the final product.

• Edit by column rather than by line (especially helpful when you create or change tables or work with column-oriented datasets), referred to in Emacs as rectangle editing.

• Create simple pictures using keyboard characters or the mouse.

Much of this chapter, though, focuses on some fairly simple stuff: tabs and indenting text. We describe Emacs's behavior in primarily two major modes: fundamental mode and text mode. If you are a developer, you'll probably want to write code in a mode appropriate to the language you're using; see Chapter 9 for details. If you use a markup language like HTML, see Chapter 8 for additional relevant information.