Emacs - Extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor

Aug 29, 2022 · 2 min read · editor tui  ·
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Emacs is one of the godfathers of text editors. It is a free long-standing software project, with tons of extensions and funcionalities.

Emacs is one of the oldest but still widely used text editors for Linux and other UNIX-based systems.

It has a huge amount of functionalities, which do not only include text processing, but have been expanded to manage email, files, outlines, RSS feeds and games.

As stated in the homepage "at its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing". This captures perfectly the nature of Emacs. Its flexibility and extensibility lies in fact in the possibility to implement features using the Emacs Lisp language, and those extensions are completely integrated in the "execution environment" which is Emacs itself. This fact also brought to the joke which says that Emacs is a fine operating system in need of a good editor, i.e., it can do almost everything but it would deserve a decent way to edit text.

One of the characteristic of Emacs is the sometimes long sequence of key combinations to trigger the execution of an operation. These sequences are a combination of control, alt/meta and letter keys.

One of the biggest showstoppers for my personal taste is that it needs Emacs Lisp for being programmed or customized, although the configuration of the most of available extensions are very well documented, making it a matter of copy&paste into the Emacs configuration file, so that the required knowledge of Elisp is relatively limited.

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