Using Emacs

To quote the Emacs Manual:

Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor.

If this seems to be a bit of a mouthful, an easier explanation is Emacs is a text editor and more. At its core it is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp ("elisp", for short), a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Some of the features of GNU Emacs include:

Content sensitive major modes for a wide variety of file types, from plain text to source code to HTML files.
Complete online documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
Highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language.
Support for many languages and their scripts, including all the European "Latin" scripts, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Ethiopian, and some Indian scripts. (Sorry, Mayan hieroglyphs are not supported.)
A large number of extensions which add other functionality. The GNU Emacs distribution includes many extensions; many others are available separately—even a web browser.

I have been using emacs as my editor of choice for a bazillion years. This page contains tidbits of information I don't want to forget and configuration files that I don't want to lose.

Online Resources

Configuration and Customization

.emacs — the primary configuration / customization file used by emacs
awc.el — my libary of customizations
restore.el — my library to automatically reopen the set of files last edited (there may be public libraries that now do the same thing, but I have stuck with the one I wrote back before those were available).

Some public libraries I use to extend emacs that are not included (or weren’t at some point in time) in the emacs distribution:

cua-mode.el — enables Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, and Ctrl-V as copy, cut, paste; also enables Shift-Drag and Shift-arrowKey to highlight selection
php-mode.el — provides syntax highlighting and other goodies for editing PHP code