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Emacs editing environment, Part 3: Advanced Emacs text operations

Get going with this famous open source editor

Michael Stutz, Author, Consultant

Michael Stutz is author of The Linux Cookbook, which he also designed and typeset using only open source software. His research interests include digital publishing and the future of the book. He has used various UNIX operating systems for 20 years.

Summary: This tutorial, the third in a series, builds on what you've learned by taking you through a tour of some of the more advanced Emacs features for text operations. You get a hands-on demonstration of advanced editing techniques, including how to perform a recursive edit, mark and use rectangles of text, and handle complex selection techniques using the kill ring and the secondary selection.

View more content in this series

Date: 01 May 2007
Level: Intermediate

Activity: 19332 views
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Before you start

Learn what to expect from this tutorial, and how to get the most out of it.

About this series

The Emacs editing environment is a favorite of UNIX® developers. It's known around the world as the king of editors, but many users find it has a bit of a learning curve. The Emacs environment doesn't seem intuitive at first glance, and it doesn't work like other editors and word processors. But learning Emacs doesn't have to be difficult. Once you get going, you'll see how intuitive it is and become more comfortable with it after each use. This tutorial series shows you the way, taking you from the basics of Emacs, such as its features, philosophy, key-command layout, and methods for editing text, through many of its powerful editing features.

After completing this series, you'll be able to comfortably use Emacs for everyday editing, be well on your way to Emacs proficiency, and have a good feel for many of the advanced capabilities of Emacs.

About this tutorial

This is the third installment in a series of tutorials on learning Emacs; it builds on what you learned in the first two tutorials by taking you on a tour of some of the more advanced Emacs features for text operations. You get a hands-on demonstration of advanced editing techniques, including how to perform a recursive edit and mark and use rectangles of text, and you learn about complex selection techniques involving use of the kill ring and the secondary selection.

Objectives

The primary objective of this tutorial is to take users who already have a basic understanding of Emacs text-editing techniques and show you how to build on those basic and intermediate techniques to perform advanced editing tasks, such as making secondary selections, entering recursive edits, and using rectangles. After working through this tutorial, you should be familiar with all these topics and be able to use them in your editing sessions.

Prerequisites

This tutorial builds on several concepts introduced in the first two installments in this series (see Resources), so you should take them before attempting this tutorial. The practice file from the first installment is used in the examples here.

The special Emacs notation for representing keystrokes, which is used in this tutorial and throughout the entire series, is described in the introduction of the first tutorial of the series, "Emacs editing environment, Part 1: The basics of Emacs" (see Resources).

Although this tutorial is written for all levels of UNIX expertise, it's helpful if you have at least a rudimentary understanding of the UNIX filesystem:

Files
Directories
Permissions
Filesystem hierarchy

System requirements

This tutorial requires a user account on any UNIX-based system that has a recent copy of Emacs installed.

There are several varieties of Emacs; the original and most popular is GNU Emacs, which is published online by the GNU Project (see Resources).

You should have a recent copy of GNU Emacs -- one that is at version 20 or greater. Versions 20 and 21 are the most commonly available, and development snapshots of version 22 are also available. This tutorial works with any of these versions for Emacs. If your system is running something older, it's time to upgrade.

To know what version of Emacs you have running, use the GNU-style --version flag:

$ emacs --version
GNU Emacs 22.0.91.1
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of Emacs
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.
$

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