GNU Emacs Manual, For Version 21, 15th Edition

by Richard M. Stallman

Book Overview

Updated for Emacs Version 21 but still applies to Version 20. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188211485X
• ISBN13: 9781882114856
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Free Software Foundation
• Length: 644 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.3" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

14th edition has all the indices that you need!

(This is a note about the 14th edition--20.7)One of my favorite technical books from a documentation standpoint is Richard Stallman's superior GNU Emacs Manual. The tool is justly famous and the manual is one of the best written and best organized books I'd ever seen. I've had problems at times figuring out how Emacs works, but when I came across an older edition of this book at a used bookstore, I realized that I simply had to have this book. I've found almost everything I wanted to know from this book and gotten a sense of how everything works. The manual also leaves me with a sense of how wonderfully extensible and versatile the program is. The book contains a glossary, a key index, a command and function index and a concept index. Wow! This is every technical writer's dream! I can generally find the answer to any question within a few seconds when consulting this manual (the help that comes with the program....well, that's another story). Keeping true to the GNU philosophy, Stallman makes the book (as well as a LISP reference guide) available for free at the gnu site. So the good news is that the book is expertly written and organized. What's the bad news? First, the 14th edition (20.7) book doesn't include a discussion of how to use major modes of Emacs (such as PSGML) or the very handy PCL-CVS. Also, because emacs and xemacs have followed different development paths, Stallman's book doesn't cover the NT-based xemacs implementation. Love or hate xemacs, you have to appreciate the attempt at a GUI, especially when it comes to configuring the program. The package update functionality of Xemacs, could use better documentation as well. In summary: a masterpiece of documentation, but the manual is sorely in need of a section discussing major mode and emacs.

The big enchilada

In the emacs world, this is 'The Book' by 'The Man.' Emacs is an indispensible tool imho. I use it, to this very day, under Windows XP. What's the best way to learn emacs? Buy a book, like this one, dive in and don't come out until you start to 'get it.'When I sit back and think why I still use emacs, and ferret out all the reasons, it truly ends up being completely non-bigotry related. Emacs just literally does many things better for a certain class of text-processing activities. It's a tool in the same way UNIX shell scripting is; a tool I'll probably never live without.What does emacs have/do that's head & shoulders better than other editors? Well, literally the list is quite long, but for starters: Regular expressions everywhere, navigation keystrokes for every conceivable structure & sub-structure of a text document, real unlimited undo, non-trivial keyboard macros, and of course for ultimate flexibility an embedded lisp interpreter.Word is nice - I did write a fairly large novel with it - but to this day I write many many shorter documents with emacs first. Truly. Word does have some amazing features, no joke, but for a certain class of text processing activities emacs will probably always rule. Software takes money to write, and emacs is, imho, one of the software 'pyramids' that have withstood the test of time. If you believe in the free software movement and want to learn emacs, why not buy a copy of a book by one of the men who was truly instrumental in the free software movement?

This guy knows what he is talking about

Great book about an essential software development tools. Emacs has shown it value for decades and its extensiblity keeps is up-to-date and useful for every software programming task.I believe money for the sale of this book goes to support free software, a great cause. (...).