My Favorite Tool - Emacs

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My favorite tool is Emacs.

Emacs provides an extensible and unified framework to access nice interfaces to several other tools. For instance, it allows you to:

• Keep notes, maintain TODO lists, plan projects, edit and automatically export documents to many formats (Org-mode).

• Conveniently edit Python source code and, at the same time, send code regions to a Python shell, permitting a piece-by-piece interactive programming (Python mode).

• Make the GDB debugger a user-friendly and effective tool when programming in C++ (GUD mode).

• Use Git through a beautiful interface (Magit).

• Edit LaTeX files through sophisticated packages that synchronize the text buffer with a PDF viewer, pretty-print mathematical expressions directly in the text buffer, automatically handle references and much more (Auctex).

• Access a handy but powerful LISP interpreter anytime from any text buffer.

– Francesco Montanari, Postdoctoral researcher, cosmology, Helsinki.

Have you got a favourite tool you would like to tell us about? Please use this form to add a bit of detail and we will do the rest. You can read the background to these posts here, or see what other tools people have written about.