-
-@node Intro, Glossary, GNU Free Documentation License, Top
-@unnumbered Introduction
-
- You are reading about GNU Emacs, the GNU incarnation of the advanced,
-self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time display editor Emacs.
-(The `G' in `GNU' is not silent.)
-
- We say that Emacs is a @dfn{display} editor because normally the text
-being edited is visible on the screen and is updated automatically as you
-type your commands. @xref{Screen,Display}.
-
- We call it a @dfn{real-time} editor because the display is updated very
-frequently, usually after each character or pair of characters you
-type. This minimizes the amount of information you must keep in your
-head as you edit. @xref{Basic,Real-time,Basic Editing}.
-
- We call Emacs advanced because it provides facilities that go beyond
-simple insertion and deletion: controlling subprocesses; automatic
-indentation of programs; viewing two or more files at once; editing
-formatted text; and dealing in terms of characters, words, lines,
-sentences, paragraphs, and pages, as well as expressions and comments in
-several different programming languages.
-
- @dfn{Self-documenting} means that at any time you can type a special
-character, @kbd{Control-h}, to find out what your options are. You can
-also use it to find out what any command does, or to find all the commands
-that pertain to a topic. @xref{Help}.
-
- @dfn{Customizable} means that you can change the definitions of Emacs
-commands in little ways. For example, if you use a programming language in
-which comments start with @samp{<**} and end with @samp{**>}, you can tell
-the Emacs comment manipulation commands to use those strings
-(@pxref{Comments}). Another sort of customization is rearrangement of the
-command set. For example, if you prefer the four basic cursor motion
-commands (up, down, left and right) on keys in a diamond pattern on the
-keyboard, you can rebind the keys that way. @xref{Customization}.
-
- @dfn{Extensible} means that you can go beyond simple customization and
-write entirely new commands, programs in the Lisp language to be run by
-Emacs's own Lisp interpreter. Emacs is an ``on-line extensible''
-system, which means that it is divided into many functions that call
-each other, any of which can be redefined in the middle of an editing
-session. Almost any part of Emacs can be replaced without making a
-separate copy of all of Emacs. Most of the editing commands of Emacs
-are written in Lisp; the few exceptions could have been written
-in Lisp but are written in C for efficiency. Although only a programmer
-can write an extension, anybody can use it afterward. If you want to
-learn Emacs Lisp programming, we recommend the @cite{Introduction to
-Emacs Lisp} by Robert J. Chassell, also published by the Free Software
-Foundation.
-
- When run under the X Window System, Emacs provides its own menus and
-convenient bindings to mouse buttons. But Emacs can provide many of the
-benefits of a window system on a text-only terminal. For instance, you
-can look at or edit several files at once, move text between files, and
-edit files while running shell commands.
-
-@include screen.texi
-@include commands.texi
-@include entering.texi
-@include basic.texi
-@include mini.texi
-@include m-x.texi
-@include help.texi
-@include mark.texi
-@include killing.texi
-@include regs.texi
-@include display.texi
-@include search.texi
-@include fixit.texi
-@include kmacro.texi
-@include files.texi
-@include buffers.texi
-@include windows.texi
-@include frames.texi
-@include mule.texi
-@include major.texi
-@include indent.texi
-@include text.texi
-@include programs.texi
-@include building.texi
-@include maintaining.texi
-@include abbrevs.texi
-@include picture.texi
-@include sending.texi
-@include rmail.texi
-@include dired.texi
-@include calendar.texi
-@include misc.texi
-@include custom.texi
-@include trouble.texi