6.2.1. Emacs - Introduction

Emacs is the acronym for editor macros. Emacs itself is a full-featured IDE for Lisp and Elisp programming languages. For an editor or an IDE this opens lot of avenues and possibilities. Many other IDEs have plugins or extensions to extend the functionality or add features to that IDE. But in case of Emacs, since it a fully functional Elisp interpreter, many things are available out of the box with idioms which cannot be imagined with other IDEs.

Based on the operating system you are running/using, Emacs can be obtained from https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ or https://emacsformacosx.com/

Emacs is too much versatile for its used as an editor for many programming languages, or as a day-to-day Notepad for taking notes, or maintaining files and folders as a file manager, etc. Also use cases are considered as modes in Emacs. And there are major modes and minor modes.