Emacs

Emacs is an excellent text editor, in fact it is the best editor in my opinion. It is available across all major platforms, be it Apple's Mac, or Windows and of course Linux. It is built and maintained by the Free Software Foundation. One of the best features of this software is that it behaves almost the same across all platforms. An amazing thing in and of itself even if you do not consider the level of functionality provided. No other editor comes even close to matching this level of cross-platform compatibility or level of sophistication. The primary reason for the superiority of emacs over other editors and the reason why other editors have not been able to match it is because of the language emacs has been implemented in, emacs lisp which is a variant of lisp. Lisp is a language that has plenty of variants and emacs lisp is one among them. Over the next few days I intend to mull over the emacs text editor and then move over to learning and posting about the emacs lisp language. Emacs, unlike other editors demands that its users behave in a smart manner and hence it can be quite challenging for a newbie to get started. A few useful links that will help you in this regard,

• Home page
• FAQ
• Emacs manual

In order to learn emacs lisp, there are two excellent tutorials offered by gnu. One tutorial is for beginners and by beginners I mean people who do not know how to program in lisp. You may be an expert in some "x" language but lisp being fundamentally different, it is recommended that you learn it from scratch. On the other hand, if you are a wannabe programmer but do not know any language, then take this tutorial and it might help you on your way to becoming a good if not great programmer. The other tutorial is a reference manual that contains major parts of the source code of emacs as well as a tutorial for emacs lisp. Both tutorials are pretty amazing. The emacs lisp tutorials

• For beginners
• Elisp reference manual

Enjoy !!! :-)