Emacs is not just a text editor, it is much more. It is a platform that can be used to do many different things as manipulate remote servers, chat on IRC or Jabber, play chess, send and receive emails and (guess what) edit text files.

Emacs has many advantages. It is relatively lightweight and fast, it can run both as GUI application or in text console, it does not need state-of-the-art hardware to run, it can be even used in server environments and it provides single platform for all your needs as a developer. Emacs stores it's entire configuration in files, which allows you to keep it in version control. That helps you a lot when you need to set-up your development environment an a new machine.

As every good thing on this planet Emacs also has downsides. It is definitely not very beginner friendly and it takes some time to configure it properly.

During this session we'll explain Emacs basics and show how to configure it for Drupal/PHP development. We'll cover topics as syntax highlighting, code formatting according to Drupal coding standards, snippet support, auto completion, step debugging, etc.