Why Read This Book?

Because it does so much, Emacs has a reputation for being extremely complicated. We don't think that's warranted; we teach you Emacs from the ground up, covering first the basics and then some of the more advanced features.

In this book, we have tried to reach as broad an audience as possible: from casual users to professional writers and web authors to programmers to system administrators. No matter what you do with Emacs, you will find it's easy to learn; after one or two sessions, you'll know the basics of editing any file. After you learn the basics, you can go on to learn about more advanced topics that provide the real benefits of using Emacs. These include:

• Using multiple windows and buffers so you can work on several files at once

• Customizing keyboard commands

• Tailoring Emacs to fit your work style

• Making Emacs your work environment where you can do all your everyday tasks, such as organizing files, compiling programs, and issuing shell commands

• Creating macros to streamline repetitive tasks

• Using Emacs to support programming in many languages (including C, C++, Lisp, Java, and Perl)

• Formatting files with various markup languages, such as HTML and XML

• Using word abbreviations to avoid spelling out long phrases or to correct common misspellings

Of course, many of the topics may not apply to you; some topics may be appropriate for a second reading but not for the first. Toward the end of the preface, we'll sketch several different ways to approach the book, depending on your interests and experience.