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Besides from being a powerful development environment, Emacs is cataloged by some as an entire operating system, since it provides many more features. Let’s have a look at some of the features that come with Emacs, which are pretty much programs in their own right, although included in Emacs.
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Besides from being a powerful development environment, Emacs is cataloged by some as an entire operating system, since it provides many more features. Let’s have a look at some of the features that come with Emacs, which are pretty much programs in their own right, although included in Emacs.
Emacs is a very powerful integrated development environment – but not only:
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Games
Emacs comes with several games available in the Tools->Games menu. Here you can find a great clone of Tetris, or a Solitaire game, Gomoku or even Snake.
Emacs comes with a quite decent list of games to take a short break from programming:
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Playing Tetris from within Emacs:
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Calendar
Except for showing the current date in a format similar to the output of the usual cal command, you can also use Calendar to see upcoming holidays, or make diary entries.
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Email Reader
The embedded email reader from Emacs uses a text interface to read your mail. You can manage received mails and send emails, or use labels.
Simple Calculator
Available in the Tools menu, the simple calculator provides floating-point precision and allows to group expressions in parenthesis.
calculator
File Browser
Also known as dired and accessible via the M-x dired command, the file manager is yet another useful component of Emacs. You can quickly visualize and explore the filesystem directly from Emacs. You can’t use your mouse just in a regular file manager, but the entries in the menus allow you to do pretty much all the basic functions: create directories, edit files, change file permissions, touch files, create symlinks and hardlinks.
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Operations like mode changes are available:
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In addition, if you prefer to do your editing on the terminal and use Emacs instead of Vim or Nano, you can run it as emacs –no-window. You will need to be familiar with the basic commands to move throughout a document, or to save a new file (^w – which means press Ctrl+W), create a new file (^x f – press Ctrl+X followed by F) or quit Emacs (^x ^c – press Ctrl+X followed by Ctrl+C).
Running Emacs in a terminal:
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What about you? What uses does Emacs have that others may find useful? Please share them below. Full Story |
