How to install Emacs text editor on Ubuntu 16.10, Ubuntu 16.04 and other Ubuntu Linux Derivatives. GNU Emacs is the most popular and most ported Emacs text editor, and it was created by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project.
GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor — and more. Its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.
Features:
- Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types.
- Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
- Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts.
- Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.
- An entire ecosystem of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more.
- A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions.
Install Emacs in Ubuntu
Emacs 25.1 is the latest release of the GNU Emacs. (Released September 17, 2016). Emacs 25.1 has a wide variety of new features, including:
- Emacs can now load shared/dynamic libraries (modules). A dynamic Emacs module is a shared library that provides additional functionality for use in Emacs Lisp programs, just like a package written in Emacs Lisp would.
- Experimental support for Cairo drawing.
- Enhanced network security (TLS/SSL certificate validity and the like) via the new Network Security Manager (NSM).
- New minor mode ‘electric-quote-mode’ for using curved quotes as you type.
- Character folding support in isearch.el.
- New and improved facilities for inserting Unicode characters: C-x 8 now has shorthands for several chars, such as U+2010 (HYPHEN), U+2011 (NON-BREAKING HYPHEN), and U+2012 (FIGURE DASH).
To install Emacs 25.1 on Ubuntu Systems, run the following commands in Terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get build-dep emacs24
wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-25.1.tar.gz
cd ~/Downloads && tar -xf emacs-25.1.tar.* && cd emacs-25.1
./configure
make
sudo make install
You can also manually download and install Emacs 25.1 from https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html
Once installed, launch Emacs by running emacs or emacs-24.4 in terminal and lock the shortcut to the Unity Launcher.
For more info, visit https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/