Emacs is pretty good at determining the default encoding of the file or buffer that it displays. The encoding of the file is determined when the file is loaded and the same encoding is used to save the content back to the file. read file in a specific encoding You can specify the encoding to be used while opening a…

Everybody has a different preference for fonts, font size and the look and feel of the editor that they are using. Most modern editors allow you to customize every single aspect of the look and feel and emacs is no exception. As with almost everything in emacs, there are several different ways to set the font and the font size…

One of the features you will need to use repeatedly while using a text editor is the ability to save the buffer or the file to the disk. In Emacs, saving the file or buffer to disk is easy enough but how do you rename the current buffer or save it to different file on the disk. save buffer to…

There are several different commands to sort text in the buffer. Reversing lines, words or even paragraphs is just a variation of sorting text. Reverse Lines in buffer The command to reverse text is reverse-region, and as the command indicates works on the current active region of the buffer. M-x reverse-region The reverse-region command will reverse the order of 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…