Terminal 101: 4 emacs Easter eggs

Every Monday, we’ll show you how to do something new and simple with Apple’s built-in command line application. You don’t need any fancy software, or a knowledge of coding to do any of these. All you need is a keyboard to type ’em out!

Easter eggs are fun, hidden features that are implemented in software for the user to find. The developers of emacs (the text editor built into Mac OS X, and many other Unix-based systems) included many hidden Easter eggs to be discovered by its users. We’ll highlight a few of them here for you to try out.

1. Mud

MUDs (or Multi-User Dungeon) are an old-school game play experience that allowed multiple people to play text-based role playing games over the Internet. While most of these games have died down in popularity, you can still experience a similar text-based game in emacs.