10.1 Emacs Concepts
This section describes some Emacs terminology that may be unfamiliar
if you haven't used Emacs before.
10.1.1 Modes
One of the features that makes Emacs
popular is its editing modes. The modes set up an environment
designed for the type of editing you are doing, with features like
having appropriate key bindings available, and automatically
indenting according to standard conventions for that type of
document. There are two types of modes, major and minor. The major
modes include modes for various programming languages like C or Perl,
for text processing (e.g., SGML or even straight text), and many
more. One particularly useful major mode is Dired (Directory Editor),
which has commands that let you manage directories. Minor modes set
or unset features that are independent of the major mode, such as
auto-fill (which controls word wrapping), insert versus overwrite,
and auto-save. For a full discussion of modes, see Learning
GNU Emacs or the Emacs Info documentation system
(C-h i).
10.1.2 Buffer and Window
When you open a file in Emacs, the file is put into a
buffer
so you can edit it. If you open another file, that file goes into
another buffer. The view of the buffer contents that you have at any
point in time is called a
window. For a small file, the window might
show the entire file; for a large file, it shows only a portion of a
file. Emacs allows multiple windows to be open at the same time, to
display the contents of different buffers or different portions of a
single buffer.
10.1.3 Point and Mark
When you are editing in Emacs, the
position of the cursor is known as
point. You can set a
mark at another place in the text to operate
on the region between point and mark. This is a very useful feature
for such operations as deleting or moving an area of text.
10.1.4 Kill and Yank
Emacs uses the terms
kill and
yank for the concepts more commonly known today
as cut and paste. You cut text in
Emacs by killing it, and paste it by yanking it back. If you do
multiple kills in a row, you can yank them back all at once.
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