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Kelvin Wangonya
Kelvin Wangonya

Posted on • Originally published at wangonya.com on

Play games on your terminal using emacs

If you've never opened emacs before, here's a great chance to do it for the first time (like me 😅). Turns out, emacs comes with some pretty nice old school games built in.

Note: I'm assuming you're on a *NIX system

To play, start emacs on the terminal:

$ emacs
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

I thought I'd have to install emacs on my Mac but have it already there on my Linux (Manjaro i3 18.0.4) but to my surprise, it was already there on my Mac and I had to install in on Linux. So if you run the command and see something like Unknow command emacs, you'll need to install it first.

If the command runs successfully, you should see something similar to the screenshot below.

emacs
emacs

Linux decided to install a GUI one 🤷🏽‍♂️

emacs GUI
emacs GUI

Press the escape then x keys, and M-x should appear at the bottom of the screen.

Next, type in the name of the game you want to play. You can pick from this list. I like snake, so that's what I'll type in.

playing snake on emacs
playing snake on emacs

emacs snake2

You can quit emacs by pressing Ctrl-x Ctrl-c.

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