Raspberry Pi

How to Install Emacs Text Editor on Raspberry Pi

Emacs is an open-source text editor widely used by programmers, scientists, and writers. It’s one of the oldest editors that offer a wide range of features, including code completion, syntax highlighting, spell-checking and more. It also has an extensible framework that allows users to customize the editor that suits their needs. You can use this text editor to edit your codes, text, and other documents since it easily supports editing any file type.

To install Emacs Editor on Raspberry Pi, the users should follow this guide.

Install Emacs Editor on Raspberry Pi

Emacs is a lightweight text editor which you can install directly through the Raspberry Pi repository. But, before that, update the Repository via the below-given commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

Now, install Emacs Editor via the command given below:

$ sudo apt install emacs -y

You can confirm the Emacs Editor installation from the following command:

$ emacs --version

Run Emacs on Raspberry Pi

On Raspberry Pi, you can run Emacs Editor through terminal using the following command:

$ emacs

To run a file on the terminal through Emacs editor, follow the below-given steps:

$ emacs <filename>

If you want to run the Emacs Editor GUI application, go to the Raspberry Pi Application menu, and run Emacs (GUI) from the “Programming” section.

You can open any file through the terminal or GUI and start editing on the Raspberry Pi system with Emacs Editor.

Remove Emacs Editor on Raspberry Pi

If you don’t like using Emacs Editor, you can remove it from the Raspberry Pi system anytime from the following command:

$ sudo apt remove emacs -y

Conclusion

Emacs is a simple text editor that can run and edit any file either from the terminal or through GUI. Raspberry Pi users can easily install this editor via apt package manager command. The editor can then be opened either from the terminal or through GUI from the Application menu. The users can also remove this editor through the “apt remove” command in case they don’t want to use it anymore in the system.

About the author

Awais Khan

I'm an Engineer and an academic researcher by profession. My interest for Raspberry Pi, embedded systems and blogging has brought me here to share my knowledge with others.