Emacs Basic (3)

Entering and Exiting

To enter Emacs you type: emacs or emacs foo.

To Exit Emacs use the command C-x C-c, save-buffers-kill-emacs

To suspend Emacs (in the Unix sense of stopping it and putting it in the background) use the command C-x C-z (which is bound to suspend-emacs). How you restart it is up to your shell, but is probably based on the fg command.

Self Inserting Commands

Once you've got Emacs running, you can type into it. There's no need for any special insert mode or anything like that: remember, printing characters insert themselves because each one is bound to self-insert-command.

The Mode Line

The Emacs screen is completely devoted to the text of your file, except for one line near the bottom of the screen: the Mode Line. This line is informational: you can never move into it. It's almost always in reverse video or otherwise highlighted. It displays important information (which may change), including:

• - The state of the buffer, one of modified (indicated by a pair of asterisks), unmodified (hyphens), or read-only (indicated by a pair of % signs).
• - The name of the file you're editing (it will be *scratch* if you're not editing any file).
• - The major mode (in parens).
• - The amount of the file that you can see on the screen:

All, You can see all of the file.
Top, You can see the top of the file.
Bot, You can see the bottom of the file.
Percentage, NN% indicates the percentage of the file above the top of the window.

The Mini-buffer

The blank line below the mode line is the minibuffer. The minibuffer is used by Emacs to display messages, and also for input when Emacs is prompting you to type something (it may want you to type yes or no in answer to a question, the name of a file to be edited, the long name of a command, etc).

The minibuffer is also known as the echo area, because Emacs echoes keystrokes here if you're typing really slowly. To see this, type any multi-character keystroke (like, ESC q) with a long pause between the keystrokes.