Title: Members' Experiences

Emacs is an advanced free editor available on Windows and Unix. I have written about it before when I was new to it, but I would like to do so again now that I have been using it for some time. I will only write about the features that I actually use.

Emacs stands for Editor with Macros. The macros in question are written in emacs' own dialect of Lisp. In fact, practically every feature in emacs is implemented in this macro language, making it highly customisable. Learning this language is well worth the trouble if you like to customise things; so far I have written about 1500 lines of Lisp to customise my environment (partly because I have poor sight) and to make my editing easier by automating any repetitive task I find myself doing.

The fact that everything is running in Lisp does make emacs slower than other editors, but this is no great problem on a fast enough computer. It can take a few seconds to load, but I just leave it running all the time - it is useful having an emacs "scratch" window on the desktop to make notes in. Indeed, emacs is supposed to be more of a work environment than a utility, as is evident from its ability to put a clock, mail and system load indicator on the status bar. When some program needs to invoke an editor as a utility, I tell it to invoke "gnuclient", which makes a connection to my running copy of emacs.

Emacs can of course edit multiple files with multiple views of each file, in multiple windows, and you can if you wish divide a window into frames (although in emacs terminology it is the other way around). An emacs "buffer" is (usually) a file being edited, and buffers need not be visible all the time, so it is possible to have many files open while keeping your desktop uncluttered. Emacs does have a problem with editing very large files; if you exceed your physical RAM size then it will swap violently. Emacs has all the features I would expect in an advanced editor, including syntax highlighting, automatic formatting and navigation aids for source code in many languages as well as for page description languages, HTML, configuration files and so forth; it will interact with compilers, debuggers and other tools; and it has a nice XML mode that lets you hide parts of the tree from view and can prompt you with a list of valid elements. It also has multi-level undo/redo and multiple clipboards, as-you-type searching (including a regular expression search/replace, which is very useful once you know how to use it), a directory browser that can look inside compressed archives, and a number of features for accessing the online documentation, not just for emacs but for the rest of the system as well.

I use emacs to read my email and newsgroups. Some say it is silly for an editor to include this functionality, but I like it because I can use all the power of emacs (including my macros) when I am composing email or managing my messages. I sometimes use emacs' Web browser when I need to do things with macros or edit complex forms, but I do not use it for general Web browsing because this can be slow.

Emacs has good multilingual support - it can read, write and display a number of character encodings, including those of Far Eastern scripts (I do this in large print) and it supports input methods for these languages. It can also interact with Chinese-English and Japanese-English dictionaries, which is most useful when you're writing to Chinese or Japanese friends. Support for Unicode is sadly lacking, so I still have to use a command-line conversion tool for that.

I would recommend emacs to anyone who is prepared to learn it. It does require time and effort to understand its concepts as a Lisp interpreter, but for me this was a worthwhile investment. The version of emacs I am using is XEmacs 21.4 under Linux www.xemacs.org); it is worth keeping up-to-date with the latest version if you have the bandwidth. If you do not want to write Lisp then emacs can still be useful, but there are plenty of other editors (including emacs derivatives) that could be more appropriate. I wonder if anyone else would like to write about their favourite editor.