Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Starting emacs and Dabbling with It

For the novice, emacs offers a reasonable middle ground between the user-friendliness of pico and the power of vi (or vim). It’s not available on all systems, though, so you’ll just have to type in the command to see if you have access to it. (Refer back to Chapter 1 if you don’t.)

Using emacs, you can just type, as you’d expect, then use command sequences, which are basically keys, to make emacs do useful things like save, quit, and the like. When you start emacs, it’ll probably look very much like Figure 4.17. If you’re on a Linux system, which “helpfully” opens a new window and gives you the graphical version, ...