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Learning GNU Emacs by Debra Cameron & Bill Rosenblat Recommended

ISBN: 0-937175-84-6       Publisher: O'Reilly       Pages: 411pp       Price: £23-75

GNU Emacs, Unix Text Editing and Programming by Schoonover & Bowie & Arnold Recommended

ISBN: 0-201-56345       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 609pp       Price: £20-95

Categories:   unix

Reviewed by Tony Sumner in C Vu 4-5 (Jul 1992)

There are many versions of Emacs, some free and some quite expensive. There is a commercial one called Unipress (or Gosling) and there are variants Jove ('Joe's own version of Emacs') and Epoch ('Emacs on steroids') but the most popular one is GNU Emacs version 18, which is the one these two books are about. This comes from the Free Software Foundation and is therefore free, except possbly for a small handling charge.

Both books cover the basic features of Emacs, how you get help, working with buffers and windows, macros, the language modes and how to write your own commands in LISP. They both describe how to customize Emacs by changing the various keymaps to create your own environment and deal with the case where your network needs ^S and ^Q for flow control. All this is perfectly adequate for what you will want to do as an ordinarily ambitious user, anything else you need will normally be provided in local documentation. As it happened I was installing Emacs on my own network while I was reading the books and I found that they did not go quite far enough for that. They do not need to; all my questions were answered in the FAQ file that comes with the distribution.

The O'Reilly book is written in a relaxed, flowing style that I found a joy to read. It uses short words and plain language. It is helpful about telling you when a symbol is 1 or l, 0 or o. Both authors clearly know Emacs very well and use it themselves with pleasure. It is marred by a number of mistakes, mostly in the indexing, and I suppose to earn my keep as a reviewer I should tell you about them, though none are serious. For example the command ESc-s ('center-line') is not in the index. The command ESc-C-C (ESc, then ^C) is listed as C-ESc-C in the summary table. Some of the index entries are out by 1. A lack of agreement about whether ESc is followed by a minus or not has played havoc with the sorting of one section of the index. Sometimes the index tells you the actual command, sometimes not; for example C-x C-q is described as 'read-only-buffer' which is near enough but if you want the exact command it is 'toggle-read-only'.

The Addison-Wesley book is bigger and much more comprehensive. There are tables of commands in every chapter as well as at the end of each chapter and at the end of the book. It fills in the details of some features that are not in the other book but which only the advanced user will need to know and which tend to clutter the text. For example, on p.19 you get a paragraph on what to do if the DEL key has been rebound, which if that were the case would surely be covered by local documentation.

The notation supposes that you have a Meta key, eg to execute M-v you hold down the Meta key and press v and to execute C-M-v you hold down both the control key and the Meta key. But most keyboards have to make do with ESc instead and in that case you press ESc first and then control and v, so the notation C-M-v seems wrong.

For completeness I should tell you that this book also has lots of mistakes but again they are not serious. Text mode is mentioned on p.10 ('if you have serious text editing to do use this mode ..') but nowhere is there a description of it. Text mode is mentioned elsewhere (but not indexed) in a mysterious way; thus 'typically you would use [word and sentence commands] in Text mode ..', but they work in fundamental mode anyway. On p.94 'D55' should be 'D54'. The authors imply (p.38) that in vi regions have to span whole lines, which is a bit rude.

To sum up, these are both excellent books and while I have been installing and getting to know Emacs from scratch I have found both of them absolutely invaluable. If you prefer a book that is well written and has enough detail to satisfy almost all your needs then go for the O'Reilly one. If you want a huge reference book that really says it all and where the information is easy to find go for the Addison-Wesley.

Cameron
Collection and Container Classes in C++ by Cameron & Tracey Hughes  (Reviewed Nov 1996)
Learning GNU Emacs by Debra Cameron