GNU Emacs

GNU Emacs is a powerful, extensible, self-documenting text editor. It is released by the Free Software Foundation and under development since 1976. In Gentoo GNU Emacs is maintained by the team of the same name, which can be reached through [mailto:emacs@gentoo.org emacs@gentoo.org]. Detailed developer information can be found on the project page.

Installation
Explanation of USE Flags:

Several versions side-by-side
In Gentoo, several Emacs versions can installed on a system simultaneously. The upstream version already installs elisp and data files into versioned subdirectories. To avoid file collisions between slots, in the Gentoo installation also binaries and man pages are suffixed with their corresponding version number.

The eselect module from can be used to link  and its auxiliary programs to the ones belonging to the desired Emacs version. Consult the eselect user guide for details on eselect.

Configuration
You can customize Emacs by clicking through the GUI (use   ) or with your  which is written in Emacs Lisp, Emacs' own Lisp dialect.

Documentation
For a quick-start documentation, type in Emacs: ( followed by ). For further help on how to use Emacs, start  and type.

Additional elisp packages
Emacs has lots of additional packages written in elisp. There is a number of ways of their distribution, but the standard one nowadays is package.el. With gentoo in can be used both on per-user and system wide way.

To install package per-user use package.el distributed with your GNU Emacs.

To install elisp packages system wide under the portage control you can use gs-elpa. Read layman documentation before using it, as gs-elpa represents ELPA repositories as layman overlays. It supports 4 repositories currently: gnu-elpa, marmalade, melpa and melpa-stable.

When your layman setup works, install gs-elpa:

After it you can start adding elisp repos and emerging packages, e.g.:

Bugs related to gs-elpa should be reported on its issue tracker.