What IS EMACS

GNU EMACS

GNU Emacs is a customizable text editor that is an interpreter and dialect with extension to support text editing with content-sensitive editing modes, built-in documentation, Unicode support, and more. It is a robust text editor which is capable of doing whatever the writer wishes to write in it. If one wishes to delve into the magic land of Emacs, they can use it for email, web browsing, organizing ones life and so much more. It is a cross platform text editor and licensed under GPL (GNU public license).

Emacs

Now let's talk about it's specifications. All the common features that most of the text editor holds, Emacs has those obviously. The features are like multi language support, autocomplete, bracket matching, collaborative editing etc. It has built-in package which works as a plugin manager. The extension languages are Emacs Lisp and C which also works as the Emacs module. It has interactive shell and the interactive debugger is gdb (for C). 

Every software has some pros and cons obviously. So, let's jump to the pros. Emacs has been around forever. It is extremely extensible. Anything you can do, you can probably do in Emacs. Emacs can do literally anything if you're determined to push past its initial learning curve. The best feature it has, is the Org Mode, an organizational add-on that you can use with Getting Things Done as your personal task organizer, which is a very big plus point, I hope ! 

Emacs is fully-configurable. You can configure anything just like the themes, sytnax highlighter, checker, menu options, keyboard shortcuts etc. It's very much consistent. You can reserve a .emacs.d folder in your github and get your customized Emacs environment in operating system. It has a great extensibility. You can work with any programming languages. You can also use it to markdown note-taking tool. You can develop entire applications for consoles, GUI, or web. The most exciting is you can also play small games in Emacs. A text editor let you to play games like tetris, just think about that !!!  

Now come to the rescue zone. In FOSS world, community or forum is everything. Whenever you need any help, a member will be always there to help you. Emacs has one of the most loyal and active community on the free software world. I agree with that opinion that the learning curve is way too high. But when you get comfortable with the key bindings and the language the whole power of Emacs will be at your hands. Emacs is available as a package to install on all flavors of Linux and can be installed with one command. It is ultra-lightweight and was designed to run on the crappiest computers. 

Let's know the cons fella !! Sometimes it is very painful to get support for your uncommon and snazzy languages or frameworks. Then you have to do some daunting HOW TO research on google. It's good for you, but nobody have that patience nowadays. By the way, Emacs is written a long long ago ! So, it's look is very ancient and you know ancient elements are not polished !! 

There are no good resources to learn Emacs step by step. The original  documentation is so good. But it's much more helpful when troubleshooting, not learning. Due to it's high learning curve, many newbie get frustrated to start with Emacs. Let me share my personal incident with you. I gave up Emacs twice before I fell in love with it the third time and decided to commit to it for the foreseeable future. 

Emacs is also for windows, mac or any other operating systems. But if you are unfamiliar with Linux or mac and command line of UNIX based operating systems then it is quite hard for you to grasp at first. So, I strongly recommend you to get familiar with command line at first. Then move to learning Emacs and using it as your IDE. (Integrated Development Environment).

Lisp is pretty much a paradigm breaker to all the beginners. The Lisp configuration is not easy to grasp at first but you understand it after a while. I will talk about Lisp in upcoming posts. But for now, consider it as a programming language. Another issue is some terminals might inject some characters sometimes at the top of some files sometimes. The shortcuts are not very easy to master for beginners, some simple tutorial is definitely required to understand how the basic functions are working.

So, overall it becomes my favourite IDE. Many users are there who likes Vim as a competitor of Emacs. I am not going to war right now. Every person has different choice, different perspectives. We should respect them all. That's it guys. If you want to know more about Emacs, then let me know by your comments. Next time I'll come up with another interesting topic. Till then, Stay Home, Stay Safe.