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If you have been using emacs as your text editor then one of the first things you probably want to know is how to create a new file or buffer in the editor. As with many of the modern editors, emacs has the concept of a buffer and a file. A buffer is the “object” that the editor holds on…
Most emacs distributions, at least the ones I have seen come with the toolbar and the menubar enabled. More often than not, it is a distraction and a waste of space. Also if you were planning to learn emacs the emacs way, then these definitely are not helpful. You can hide or disable both the toolbar and menubar in the…
When editing a file in emacs, you can choose to display the line numbers just like the other text editors. show which line number First lets see how you can find the current line number that the point is in the buffer. This is useful if you don’t have line numbers enabled in the buffer. M-x what-line This will print…
There is a long standing joke about the vim text editor which somehow depicts the complexity of the text editors when it comes to newbies……It usually goes something like this. “I have been using vi editor for two years….mostly because I cannot figure out how to exit.” Something that can be said about emacs as well, but it does have…
If you have worked with emacs then you might be familiar with the concept of buffers. It is similar to what other editors might call tabs or files. In emacs, it refers to the contents of some file or directory that you had opened and it is a copy of the contents of those files. So the contents of the…
Emacs has several different ways of sorting text in the buffer. You can sort lines, paragraphs and also sort text based on fields or words in the line. Sort Lines This is probably the simplest of all sorting method. The sort-lines command sorts all lines in the active region. Select the region in the buffer that you want to sort…
One of the common forms of navigation with in a text editor is the ability to go to specific line in the buffer by using the line number. In emacs, you can browse or navigate the buffer in several different ways and the “go to line number” feature is just one of them. The function in emacs that performs this…
There are so many different text editors in Linux to choose from. Vi and emacs are probably two of the well known editors. There are probably several hundreds more..but as you are here you probably use emacs. Although emacs is not technically just a text editor, it does have text editing capabilities and we will consider it to be one…
