Although I have mentioned it in passing, I cannot believe I have got this far without covering Emacs, I covered Nano and Vim two years ago!

Emacs is the one of the two main text editors that I use daily, (gedit being the other one). I do everything in plain text when possible, only going to a Word Processor if I need footnotes or something.

Apple Mac OS X

If you have Mac OS X, then you have Emacs already. Open the Terminal (check out my full instructions here), then type emacs then press enter. You do not need to do anything else, you can pass go and collect £200.

However, if you want an Aqua-native graphical version with all the Apple-isms and all the bells and whistles, then pick up the universal binary from the Aquamacs project. If you are heavily experienced in the 'Mac way' then certainly do this, if you are a Unix user that is accidentally on the Mac then you probably won't need to bother.

Windows

On Windows, the nqmacs unofficial build is the best place to get the latest Emacs. It seems to have gone at little quiet recently, with no new release for a little while. I wonder why? This could well be something worth following up. It is still way newer than the official build mind. So I would still go there.

If memory servers, you download the zip file and unpack it to a folder, such as C:Program filesEmacs. Next you run a little tool called addpm.exe which you will find in the bin subdirectory. This will add the relevant entries to your registry and give you short cuts and so on, and thus make your life easier. Of course, if you run Emacs from a USB stick then you will not want to do this optional step.

Installing Emacs on Linux

On Linux, you might have Emacs already. Type emacs and see what happens.

If you do not have it then you have two choices to make. Firstly, what kind of interfaces you want to support, and secondly whether you want Emacs 21 or 22.

I personally prefer Emacs to be compiled without X and use the Gnome terminal or Tilda for any cut and pasting with external applications. If I really want anything else beyond this then I will just use gedit.

There is the original Unix GUI, based on Motif or TK or some such, and the new GTK interface available as an option in the latest versions (Such as the development version, Emacs 22). The original GUI is horrible and looks completely alien on the modern Linux desktop, the new GTK-based interface promises to be better but I have not got around to using it yet.

The next choice is whether to take the stable and older Emacs 21, or the CVS version 22. Version 22 has been around since 2004/2005, so it is still rock- solid compared to many proprietary software programs.

As always, go to your package manager first. I would be extremely surprised indeed if your distro does not have Emacs.

Gentoo Linux

On Gentoo, you first choose between the package called emacs (which is version 21), and emacs-cvs (which is 22), I have been using emacs-cvs for two years without problem.

Then you choose your use flags, I use -X, if you are using emacs 22 and want the new gtk interface then enable that with the 'gtk' flag. Enable the 'spell' use flag if you want the spell check.

Ubuntu/Debian Linux

In the .deb world there are more binaries for emacs than hot dinners.

For the latest version, i.e. for 22, there are three builds:

• emacs-snapshot - for the normal one
• emacs-snapshot-nox - for the the no-x version
• emacs-snapshot-gtk - for the posh new gtk interface

There are two builds for Emacs 21, emacs21 and emacs21-nox

And I assume that emacs and *emacs-nox * link to whatever is the current blessed version, i.e. 21 at time of writing.

Redhat/Fedora

In RPM world, you can have Emacs 21 by getting either emacs or emacs-nox, depending on whether you want the X interface or not.

Hopefully after reading this far, you are confident that you know where to go to get a working copy of Emacs onto your machine. In the future, we can discuss some more interesting issues.