Adjust your vocabulary

Emacsen - by which I mean Emacs and its variants, namely Xemacs (see, we've begun using new vocabulary already!) are harder to decipher than your average software because they don't use the vocabulary words you'd expect them to and therefore it takes a longer time to find what you're looking for in the manual or learn the options you'd like to understand. You may very well know what you want but not know how to find it. A simple vocabulary lesson will set you a long way forward in your effort to learn to use emacs. Here we go.

• Frames are what any other program would call a ``windows.'' An emacs frame can be simply another view of the same document or show different documents.
• Buffers are what any other program would call a ``file.'' In emacs you can load in several documents to edit and then cut/copy/paste between them, as you would expect. Each file that you load occupies a slot in memory and is called a buffer, and the word ``file'' is reserved for what's stored on the disk. In most cases it's the same thing.
• Windows are subdivisions of a frame. In other programs you can work on various files at one time; each one is shown as a ``tab'' which you can switch between. In emacs, the concept is called a window. You can have two vertical windows, two side-by-side windows, and more.
• Filling is what other programs call "word wrap," sort of. To get a paragraph of text to "wrap" you must essentially insert a return character at the end of every line at a certain position, say every 80th character or so to have paragraphs formatted 80 characters wide. Word processors deal with this automatically and even reformat automatically as you resize the window. Emacs does not.
• Kill means to remove text. Everyone else calls it "cut."
• Yank means to insert previously removed text, i.e "paste."
• Copy to Kill Ring is the equivalent of "copying" text in other applications.

Figure 1 shows a summary of emacs lingo and their equivalents for other software packages.

Figure 1: Emacs Vocabulary and meaning