Program development environments

• emacs
• flex, bison, and lemon
• makefiles
• source level debugging
• diff
• git
• gprof

Emacs (chapter 7 in the Sobell text)

• Emacs is an excellent graphic-based and text-based program development.

Why use Emacs?

• While not "standard", as is vi/vim, it is common, and it is easy to install
• It is exceedingly well-documented; for instance, see https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html and https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/.
• It is completely programmable. Indeed, it takes the idea of programming to a much higher level in that it maps arbitrary sequences of keystrokes to arbitrary functions.

Why use Emacs?

• Emacs Lisp is a pleasant programming language. If you like other Lisp-y languages such as the Scheme family (for what it is worth, Racket is one of the more interesting variations in the Scheme familyt), then Emacs also has a lot of support for these (for instance, https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Emacs.html)
• It is reasonably efficient.
• Having a full language as its backend, it supports a great number of things, such as a built-in PDF viewer (DocView).

The tutorial

• Most of the verbatim material is taken "verbatim" from the Emacs Tutorial. You can use ctrl-h t to enter this tutorial:

The following commands are useful for viewing 
screenfuls:

    C-v Move forward one screenful
    M-v Move backward one screenful
    C-l Clear screen and redisplay all the text,
         moving the text around the cursor
         to the center of the screen.
         (That's CONTROL-L, not CONTROL-1.)

More of the tutorial

                  Previous line, C-p
                         :
                         :
Backward, C-b .. Current position .. Forward, C-f
                         :
                         :
                    Next line, C-n

Summaries

• A fuller summary of the default bindings can be found at Emacs summary.

• The basic portions of an emacs window

  • The mode line has several parts: the first indicates your coding system. You can use ctrl-h C to find more information about your current one.
  • It then has some status information: a %% indicates that the buffer is read-only, ** indicates that the buffer is modified.
  • If you like menu bars in text mode, you can access one via "Meta-`".

Summaries

• Creating windows

  • You can split your current window vertically with ctrl-x 2.
  • You can split your current window horizontally with ctrl-x 3.
  • You can jump around windows with ctrl-o. You can even scroll another buffer ctrl-meta-v.
  • You can use ctrl-x 1 to remove all other windows except the one that you are using.

Summaries

• Buffer control

  • You can list your current buffers with ctrl-x ctrl-b.
  • You can use ctrl-o to leap into that new buffer, and then use the "o" key to go directly into the buffer, or the "k" key to mark it for removal (this is only a mark, it doesn't do anything active), and then "x" to execute the marked removals.
  • You can use ctrl-x b to switch buffers.
  • You can use ctrl-x s to save all modified buffers.

Summaries

• Macros

  • You can start recording macros in emacs with ctrl-x ( and end them with ctrl-x )
  • You can play the current macro with ctrl-x e
  • You can given an argument to a function with ctrl-u NUM; giving one to a keyboard macro invocation causes that macro to be called NUM times.