GNU Emacs, install this mythical text editor for Ubuntu / Linux Mint

about gnu emacs

In the next article we are going to take a look at Gnu Emacs 25.3.2. East text editor It does not need any introduction, as it is quite famous and used by all types of computer scientists around the world. Emacs is a free, open source, extensible and customizable text editor. It is multiplatform and we will find it available for Gnu / Linux, Windows and Mac. It is also developed by the GNU project and published under the GNU GPL license.

I don't think I can tell anything new about his story either. Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s in the labs at MIT. Richard Stallman began working on GNU Emacs way back in 1984 to produce a free software alternative to the proprietary Gosling Emacs. Work on this editor is still active in 2017.

Gnu Emacs is a text editor and with a large number of functions. This makes it very popular with programmers and technical users. GNU Emacs is part of the GNU project and is the most popular version of Emacs with a lot of development activity. This editor is described in the GNU Emacs User Manual as: «an extensible, customizable, real-time and self-documenting editor«. The latter term does not mean that Emacs writes its own documentation, but rather that it presents its own documentation to the user. This feature makes Emacs documentation very accessible to everyone.

project with gnu emacs

The capabilities of Emacs are tremendous. It has more than 10.000 built-in commands and its user interface allows combining these commands in macros to automate the work (this is something that when mastered will make this a great editor). Additionally, Emacs implementations often include a dialect of the Lisp programming language that provides deep extensibility. This will allow users and developers to write new commands and applications for the editor. Some extensions have been written to handle email, archives, outlines, RSS, as well as clones of ELIZA, Pong, Conway's Life, The Snake and Tetris game.

In the Unix culture, Gnu Emacs it is one of the two main contenders in the traditional publisher war. The other contender is vi.

General Features of GNU Emacs 25.3.2

As I have already written, the characteristics of this fantastic editor are many, but among them we should highlight:

  • The content editing modes, which include syntax color for many file types.
  • It has a fantastic and comprehensive documentation in addition to the documentation incorporated in the program. It also has a user manual that all of us who start can get out of more than one trouble.
  • Da full Unicode support for almost all human scripts.
  • Is an editor highly customizable using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface for it.
  • An entire ecosystem of functionalities beyond text editing. These include a project planner, mail and newsreader, debugger interface, calendar, and more.
  • A good system to download and install extensions.

You can consult all its characteristics and documentation about this legendary editor in its web page.

Gnu Emacs Installation

To install this program in our Ubunto, we can do it directly from the Software Center of our Ubuntu. But we will find a more current version (version 25.3.2 at the time of writing this article) available for Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty / 16.04 Xenial / 14.04 Trusty / Linux Mint 18/17 and other Ubuntu derivatives in the next repository that we will install. To install GNU Emacs in Ubuntu / Linux Mint we will only have to open the terminal (Ctrl + Al + T) and copy the following commands into it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install emacs25

To install Text-based Emacs, we would have to do it using the following command:

sudo apt-get install emacs25-nox

Uninstall Gnu Emacs

To remove this text editor from our operating system we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T). After that we will only have to write the following in it:

sudo apt remove emacs25 && sudo apt autoremove

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