Emacs text editor and polytonic Greek

Greek Learning Greek
1

For typing in polytonic Greek, I have found nothing more handy than the free Emacs, an amazing text editor.

Emacs contains within it changes of input method. I can shift back and forth easily in the same document with a key stroke, Control-. This makes it easy to type a Greek passage, and then annotate it in English, the language in which I know the grammar terms. I can change to polytonic Greek, and back to regular English typing without bothering with the operating system, because Emacs contains this capability within itself.

I can go to Perseus in my browser and load the NT book of Acts, in the browser. Then I easily copy book 2 of acts into Emacs. I use the grammar and dictionary aids in Perseus, still in my browser, and copy the needed information into the file in Emacs.

Some find Emacs daunting, because there is so much of it. But it’s like a big city; only taxi drivers really know everything. To everybody else, it’s like a few neighborhood-islands connected by streets and mass transit. To begin, you need to know how to load and save a file. You can pick that up from the menus.

You can get it here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

2

Thanks for posting this. I have downloaded emacs. On my Mac I had to install home-brew first. All very simple to do. I look forward to trying it out.

3

This might help you get started.

Emacs lets ordinary keyboards produce polytonic Greek by means a function called an input-method. The input-method is invoked by a command set-input-method. While there are several input-methods for producing Greek, the one I prefer is greek-ibycus4.

ibycus4 features postfix diacriticals. That is, first you type the character, and after that, you type the diacritical that goes with the character.

Emacs can have several files open at once, but the input-method is valid only for the file for which it is called forth. This is very handy.