PLUG Emacs Apps Presentation

Presenter Michael Olson
Web site http://www.mwolson.org/

This presentation will cover the various applications that can be run from within Emacs.

What is Emacs?
What are its basic features?
Basic Emacs terminology
Applications
Helper programs
Standalone programs
Featured software
Gnus
ERC
Muse
Planner
Xtla
Q and A

What is Emacs?

To quote the Emacs Manual:

Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor.

Emacs is also: an operating system that happens to edit text really well.

What are its basic features?

Why should you use Emacs instead of Notepad or GNotepad?

And my favorite feature:

This programming language is older than C, but still used by many people today! With it, all kinds of applications can be made that run from within Emacs.

Basic Emacs terminology

buffer
Place in memory where an opened file is stored. These don't necessarily have to have a file associated with them, however. In that case, a buffer would act like a temporary file.
mode
Emacs operates in several "modes", the most prevalent of which is Text mode. Having different modes allows Emacs to colorize files and map keystrokes depending on what kind of file you are editing.
key-binding
The sequence of keys that you have to press in order to perform an action. Emacs can have prefix keys, which means you hit the keys, release them, and then hit something else to complete an action.

The way we refer to key sequences in Emacs is probably a little different than what you're used to. In the previous node, I wrote the keys in a way that looks familiar. Here's what they would look like in the Emacs documentation.

Familiar notation Emacs notation
Alt+x global-font-lock-mode, ENTER M-x global-font-lock-mode RET
Control+h, T C-h T
Control+h, f, what-page, ENTER C-h f what-page RET
Control+h, i C-h i

The reason that Alt becomes "M-" is rather esoteric, but has to do with the fact that keyboards used to have a Meta key rather than an Alt key when it was first made. Emacs is old.

Applications

There are 2 kinds of software programs that you can be made for Emacs: helper programs and standalone programs.

Helper programs

Helper programs are Emacs Lisp programs that extend other Emacs modes, but are not considered modes themselves.

auto-fill
Automatically breaks up long lines as you type.
footnote
Allows footnotes to be inserted in a document. It puts a numeric place-holder in the text, like "[1]".
flyspell
Provides as-you-type spell-checking.

These all come with Emacs.

Standalone programs

Standalone programs are those that have their own mode.

The following are available separately.

Program Description URL
AUCTeX Make it easier to write TeX files http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/
BBDB Keep track of people - useful for contact information http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Emacspeak Audio desktop for the vision-impaired http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/
EMMS Listen to music and manage playlists http://www.gnu.org/software/emms/
ERC Modular, extensible IRC Client http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ERC
Rcirc "Just works" IRC client http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/rcirc
Jabber Jabber client http://intellectronica.net/emacs-jabber/
Gnus Read email and news, thorough, expert-level http://www.gnus.org/
MH-E An easy-to-use, yet featureful, Mail reader http://mh-e.sourceforge.net/
Muse Publish documents http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs-muse/
Planner Plan your life http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PlannerMode
w3m Browse the web http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/
Xtla Revision control helper http://wiki.gnuarch.org/xtla

The following come with Emacs.

Program Description
Appt Get reminders when appointments are near
Calc Featureful RPN calculator
Calendar Show the events of the month
Diary Keep track of appointments
Dired File manager

Featured software

Gnus

Read email, news, RSS, and anything else you can think of. A bit hard to get working. Features include:

ERC

Full-featured IRC client. Features include:

When combined with Bitlbee (http://www.bitlbee.org/), an AIM, Jabber, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo to IRC gateway, it can even be used to send messages to buddies from other chat networks.

The #PurdueLUG channel on freenode has a bot called plugbot that runs on a dedicated ERC session, with the help of the ErBot add-on software for ERC (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ErBot).

Muse

Emacs Muse is an authoring and publishing environment for Emacs. It simplifies the process of writings documents and publishing them to various output formats. Muse uses a very simple Wiki-like format as input.

Muse consists of two main parts: an enhanced text-mode for authoring documents and navigating within Muse projects, and a set of publishing styles for generating different kinds of output.

I maintain it.

A full manual is available in several formats.

Formats:
Possible uses:
Features:

Planner

Planner is a Personal Information Manager (PIM). You can use it to manage your tasks, schedule, and notes.

Manual: http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/doc/dev/planner/html/planner-el.html

Core features:

Additional features:

Xtla

Emacs interface to the GNU Arch (http://wiki.gnuarch.org) revision control system.

Interfaces:

The following are available when editing a file that is associated with an Arch project.

Q and A

At this time, feel free to ask questions about Emacs or its add-ons. I will demo other Emacs applications on request if I have them.