"Many programs have start-up settings, which they read from a configuration file or from some database. Emacs is no exception: when it starts, it reads a file called ".emacs" from your home directory. However, the big difference is that .emacs does not consists of simple "key=value"-pairs. Instead, your .emacs is an Emacs-Lisp (elisp) program itself.

"...The good news is: Emacs is a revolutionary, almost indescribably QWAN-infused software system. Non-Emacs users and casual users simply can't appreciate how rich and rewarding it is, because they have nothing else to compare it to. [...] Emacs is self-hosting: writing things in it makes the environment itself more powerful.

"One nice feature of Emacs, that is as old as Emacs itself, are buffers. Most Emacs users like them because you can have multiple buffers open at once and work on many things at once. And for the record, I'm actually a big fan of the Emacs buffer menu..."

"Emacs-22+ doesn't support Xft fonts, hence the look and feel of emacs on X-Windows is not that good. But development is going on to provide this feature in emacs. The emacs-unicode-2 branch for emacs has this feature, hopefully this will get integrated to emacs-23.

I followed the following steps to compile emacs unicode from CVS..."

"...Emacs is a text editor. And it’s a lot more — sometimes too much. I know of a number of Emacs users who practically live in the editor. As I pointed out in a previous post, some users go a little overboard with the way in which they use Emacs — as a personal information manager, as a mail client, and even as a Web browser.

"I've been reading lots of blogs and opinions about emacs the last few days. What strikes me is all of these people who brag about how large their .emacs files have become. So let me make this very clear: If your .emacs file is longer than a page YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Why?

"The Emacs-w3m interface to the text based WWW browser is quite handy for reading those nasty HTML-only emails in Gnus. The latest 1.4.4 release of Emacs-w3m is very old (2005), and doesn't work with Emacs 23. For Gentoo users of the development branch of Emacs 23 and Gnus, the only compatible version is in the CVS. There is currently no ebuild to install it.

"Emacs is a class of text editors that have an extensive set of features and that are popular with computer programmers and other technically proficient computer users. GNU Emacs, a part of the GNU project, is under active development and is the most popular version.

"I recently came across the GNU page: A guided tour of Emacs.It is a gem of an introduction to Emacs.Unlike the help distributed with Emacs (tutorial, FAQ, *info* pages), this tour does a good job illustrating the wide variety of Emacs capabilities, and I think it is much more motivating for a newbie than anything else I've seen." via http://trey-jackson.blogspot.com/2008/06/guided-tour-of-emacs.h