EXPLORE THE INTERFACE

So, you have a nice emacs interface started up, but what do you do with it? First of all, familiarize yourself with the general setup of the screen. If your emacs is graphical, you will probably have a menu bar at the top of the window. This is very useful, but not necessary. As a true student of emacs, you will find your mouse all but useless. Well, maybe not, but you can certainly get along without it. From this point on, almost all of the commands will referenced as keyboard commands. It should be fairly simple to find what you need in the menu if necessary.

Take a look at the bottom of the screen. There is a white bar with some very useful information about what's going on in your document. If you just started up emacs, you will probably see something like this.

The '---' on the far left indicates the save status of the current file you are working with. If no changes have been made since you last saved, the file looks like '---'. If you have made changes since then it will look like this '-**'.

The next bit is the name of the file you are working on. If you just started emacs up, it will say '*scratch*'. The scratch pad is the default document that comes up when emacs starts. For the most part, you can just ignore the scratch pad.

To the right of the file name, right in the middle of the white bar, is the operation mode that emacs is currently running. The default mode of the *scratch* file is (Lisp Interaction). What this means is not important right now. What is important is that you see that this mode is dependent on the type of file we use. We will see this shortly, I promise.

To the right of the operation mode is the line number on which the cursor currently resides. When you first start out, it is probably on line 1 which looks like 'L1'. If you move the cursor down a few lines, the line marker will go along with you. This can be very handy in many situations.

Next to the line marker is the file position indicator. It is telling you whether you are at the 'Top' or 'Bot'tom of the file.

Directly under the white bar is the message box which will display the keyboard commands that you execute as well as any messages about the file on which you are working on.