Getting Started

Emacs is an extensible, customizable, full-screen text editor. You can learn enough to be productive in Emacs in 30 minutes, but there is enough to learn about Emacs to keep you busy for years. The goal of this tutorial is to show you enough so that you are comfortable using Emacs as a work environment, not just as a text editor. This document refers to GNU Emacs version 23 (the latest version, and the one installed on SDF).

Start by typing emacs at the shell prompt, read the splash screen and hit any key to clear it. You'll be in a so-called scratch buffer. A buffer is a place in Emacs that usually contains the text of a file for editing (but can contain other text, like error messages, command output or directory contents). Anyway, the scratch buffer is just that - a place to scratch notes or otherwise put temporary snippets of text you don't care to save. When you exit Emacs, the contents of the scratch buffer are discarded.

You will see a white or grey line at the bottom of the Emacs window, with some information displayed like the name of the buffer or file you are viewing, the line number your cursor is on, and whether or not the current buffer has been modified (indicated by two asterisks to the left of the buffer name). This is called the modeline. Like everything else in Emacs, what is displayed in the modeline is configurable, but the defaults should work fine for most people.

Just below the modeline is a blank line called the echo area or minibuffer. The minibuffer is used when Emacs has to gather data from the user, like which filename to edit, or when Emacs has to display information to the user, like error messages. You will also see Emacs command sequences echoed here as you type them.