Emacs is an highly customizable, extremely powerful editor with extensive support for a range of programming languages and tasks.

Obtaining Emacs

Emacs is freely available. Vincent Goulet’s distribution of Emacs for windows and Mac OS is very complete and highly recommended.  Most Unix distributions include packages for Emacs in their package management system.

Getting Started

Emacs has a long learning curve, and we strongly recommend beginners work their way through the built in tutorial.

Modes

Emacs is highly customizable, and many people have written modes that customize emacs’ behaviour to suit certain editing tasks. Some particularly relevant modes to be aware of are

• Auctex – an interface to LaTeX
• ESS – an interface to R
• matlab mode – a major mode for editing matlab code
• python mode – a major for editing python code

In addition there are a host of other modes for editing c/c++, Fortran, shell scripts and makefiles.  You may need to install these yourself, but many emacs distributions come bundled with a large range of modes.