Recommendable books about vi are 'Learning the vi Editor' by Linda Lamb and 'The Ultimate Guide to the vi and ex text editors' from the Hewlett-Packard Company. 6.2 GNU emacs GNU emacs is a powerful editor in the UNIX world. Emacs belongs to the GNU project of the Free Software Foundation and is available on all UNIX platforms. Before windowing systems like X became popular emacs often served as a complete windowing environment. In this text the following notation is used to describe the keystrokes.
Many commands only have 'full names', there are no corresponding keystrokes.
When you enter emacs, you are in a workspace. A cursor marks the position in the file, you don't have to do anything special before you start typing. Just above the bottom of the screen, emacs prints information about what it is doing. This means that whatever you're editing has been modified since the last time you saved it. If you haven't made any changes, the asterisks won't be there.