An Introduction to Unix

3.2. The .emacs Startup File

Before starting up, emacs tries to read a file ~/.emacs Many people store special commands in there to customize emacs to their own liking. (Reading the .emacs file of an experienced emacs user can be instructive although, unfortunately, sometimes a bit intimidating. (Feel free to take a look at mine.)

If you don't already have a ~/.emacs file, you might want to start by copying mine this way:

cp ~zeil/public_html/software/.emacs ~

After you gain some basic proficiency in emacs, you may want to take a good look at that file to see what's in there and to adjust it to your own liking.

Some of the features provided in my .emacs file are

Makes sure that the C++ editing mode gets turned on when editing .h and .cpp files.
Turns on colored syntax highlighting when supported by your terminal.
Maps the Home, End, Page Up and Page Down keys to what you would expect (again, depends on whether your terminal program actually passes these through.
Binds function keys
- F1 : undo (same as C-x u)
- F2 : toggles case sensitivity during search and replace operations (M-x toggle-case-sensitivity)
- F5 : next-error after a compile (shift F5 for previous error) (C-x `)
- F6 : turns on on-the-fly spell checking (M-x flyspell-mode)
- F8 : toggles automatic line fill/breaking (M-x auto-fill-mode)
- F9 : toggles uses of DOS/Unix line ending styles (M-x toggle-line-end-coding)
If your terminal does not support the functions keys, you can invoke these functions directly via the "longer" forms shown above.
Provides M-space as an alternate sequence for setting the mark
Binds C-z to a "go to line number..." function.

Many of these functions are subject to the limitation of your terminal program. It may or may not allow colored displays. It may or may not pass function key presses on to the remote Unix system, etc. If these things don't seem to work when you are running emacs in a terminal window, they probably will work later when you learn to run emacs via X.