See Customization.Įmacs is extensible in that you can go beyond simple customization and create entirely new commands.

To use another example, you can rebind the basic cursor motion commands (up, down, left and right) to any keys on the keyboard that you find comfortable. For instance, if you use a programming language where comments start with ' ', you can tell the Emacs comment manipulation commands to use those strings (see Comments). Emacs editing commands operate in terms of characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and pages, and expressions and comments in various programming languages.Įmacs is called 'self-documenting' because at any time you can use special commands, known as help commands, to find out what your options are, or to find out what any command does, or to find all the commands that pertain to a given topic.Įmacs is customizable in that you can easily alter its behavior in simple ways. It can control subprocesses, indent programs automatically, show multiple files at once, and more. It incorporates over 2000 commands, which can be extended using Emacs Lisp, and automated by user-created macros.Įmacs can do much more than simple insertion and deletion of text. Emacs DescriptionĮmacs is a highly extensible, extremely customizable text editor originally written for the PDP-10 by Richard Stallman in the 1970s.

Latex aquamacs tutorial