B. Narasimhan
Thursday, October 3, 12:00, in Room 450 (Seminar room)
This is the first talk in a series of regular Thursday noon (I might change this to Friday by popular request) lunch talks that I will be giving throughout the year. You are invited to bring your lunch and participate. I will speak for about 30 minutes at most and I will start on time.
A good editor is indispensable for helping us all compute. In the first talk, I will be introducing you to Emacs, a powerful editor that is becoming the editor of choice for many people using Unix. What makes Emacs so powerful is that it is extensible. A full-fledged language, Lisp, is available for adding new capabilities to Emacs. No, you don't have to know Lisp to use Emacs.
Emacs is free and runs best on Unix platforms. A DOS/Windows port also exists. I know of no full-fledged port of Emacs for Macintosh.
In the first talk, I will be introducing you to some basic manipulations in Emacs. I will discuss how to open files, save them and use the online help system that comes with Emacs. Even experienced Emacs people might find out a few new things. I will finish up with an introduction to Dired, the Emacs interface to directory and file manipulations.
The first session was quite successful---we had over 35 people in the room.
I gave two handouts; a handout on the various key sequences used in Emacs and a reference card that can go on two sides of a single page. Click here for an html version of the first handout.
The subsequent talks will continue to explore other capabilities of Emacs among other things. Here is a tentative list of topics for future talks. Please let me (naras@stat.stanford.edu) know if you want other topics covered or you would like to give a talk.