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<H2><A NAME="introduction"></A> <A NAME="s1">1. Introduction </A></H2>
<H2><A NAME="ss1.1">1.1 Copyright</A>
</H2>
<P>Copyright &copy; 1998 - 2001 Jeremy D. Zawodny. Permission to
distribute and modify this document is granted under the GNU General
Public License. An on-line copy is available at
<A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html</A><P>
<H2><A NAME="ss1.2">1.2 Audience and Intent</A>
</H2>
<P>This document is targeted at the Linux user interested in learning
a bit about Emacs and trying it out. This actually began as the
outline of a brief tutorial that I was to give at a Toledo Area Linux
User Group meeting:
<A HREF="http://www.talug.org/">http://www.talug.org/</A>. It has since grown a bit as the result of
the helpful feedback I have received from the community. See the
Credits section for details.
<P>
<P>Having said that, there is virtually nothing Linux-specific in this
document. It applies to virtually all flavors of Unix and even Emacs
running on Microsoft Windows. But since this document is part of the
Linux Documentation Project, I make a point of saying that it was
developed for Linux users--because it was.
<P>
<P>And finally, those of you who prefer the name GNU/Linux to simply
``Linux'' (read
<A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html">http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html</A> to see why one might)
are welcomed to mentally substitute GNU/Linux for all occurrences of
Linux in this document. While I don't disagree with the reasoning and
spirit behind that idea, I don't feel compelled to write GNU/Linux.
<P>
<H2><A NAME="ss1.3">1.3 What is Emacs?</A>
</H2>
<P>Emacs is different things to different people. Depending who you
ask, you'll could get any of the following responses:
<P>
<UL>
<LI>Text Editor</LI>
<LI>Mail Client</LI>
<LI>News Reader</LI>
<LI>Word Processor</LI>
<LI>Religion</LI>
<LI>Integrated Development Environment</LI>
<LI>Whatever you want it to be!
</LI>
</UL>
<P>
<P>But for our purposes, let's just pretend it's a text editor--an
amazingly flexible text editor. We'll dig deeper into the question
later on. Emacs was written by Richard Stallman (founder of the Free
Software Foundation:
<A HREF="http://www.fsf.org/">http://www.fsf.org/</A> and the GNU project
<A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/">http://www.gnu.org/</A>) and he still
maintains it today.
<P>
<P>Emacs is one of the most popular and powerful text editors used on
Linux (and Unix). It is second in popularity only to <B>vi</B>. It
is known for it huge feature set, ability to be easily customized, and
lack of bugs. It's large feature set and ability to be customized
actually are the result of how Emacs was designed and
implemented. Without going into all the details, I'll simply point out
that Emacs isn't ``just an editor''. It is an editor written mostly in
the programming language <B>Lisp</B>. At the core of Emacs is a
full-featured Lisp interpreter written in C. Only the most basic and
low-level pieces of Emacs are written in C. The majority of the editor
is actually written in Lisp. So, in a sense, Emacs has an entire
programming language ``built in'' which you can use to customize,
extend, and change its behavior.
<P>
<P>Emacs is also one of the oldest editors around. The fact that is
has been used by thousands of programmers over the past 20 (?) years
means that there are many add-on packages available. These add-ons
allow you to make Emacs do things that Stallman had probably never
dreamed possible when he first began work on Emacs. More on that
in a later section.
<P>
<P>There are many other web sites and documents which give a better
overview of Emacs, its history, and related matters. Rather than
attempt to reproduce much of that here, I suggest that you check out
some of the places listed in Section
<A HREF="Emacs-Beginner-HOWTO-6.html#other_resources">Other Resources</A> section of this document.
<P>
<H3>Ports and Versions</H3>
<P>It's worth pointing out that there are actually two different Emacs
editors: GNU Emacs and XEmacs. Both come from the same heritage and
share most of the same features. This document focuses on GNU Emacs
(version 20.3, specifically) but much of what you'll read here will
apply just as well to XEmacs and earlier versions of GNU
Emacs. Throughout this document I will simply refer to ``Emacs''. When
I do so, bear that in mind.
<P>
<H3>Getting Emacs</H3>
<P>Getting Emacs is easy. If you are using a popular Linux
distribution like Debian, RedHat, Slackware, or any of the others,
Emacs is probably an optional package that you can install from your
distribution media. If not, you can get the Emacs source code and
compile it yourself. Visit the GNU web site for the exact location:
<A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html">http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html</A><P>
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