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1 Entering and Exiting Emacs

While using Emacs you should be familiar with the following three terms:

Buffer

A buffer is a region of memory holding characters. It is the basic editing unit; one buffer corresponds to one piece of text being edited. You can have multiple buffers but you can edit only one buffer at any one time. For more information, See Buffers in SXEmacs User’s Manual.

File

A file is a region of disk space holding characters. Emacs edits a file by reading it into a buffer, editing that buffer and writing out the buffer back to the file. To save your work permanently you have to write it to a file. So after you load and work with a file, you have to save it back.

Windows

A window is a rectangular region in which a buffer is displayed. You can open multiple windows with multiple buffers and edit them by selecting the corresponding buffer. Initially, when you start emacs, it will automatically open up a window for you.