I’m a bit of a Terminal freak, but I suppose I haven’t really delved to much into the world inside of the program emacs. Not to be confused with Apple’s educational all-in-one computers, emacs started life as a text editor in UNIX systems, but it’s become oh so much more. Developers frequently add in little easter egg programs that you can only access with keystrokes from inside the program.
For example, I got pretty addicted to Quinn, the clone of a game-that-must-not-be-named that Derik mentioned the other week. But emacs has its own version of—um, the “falling blocks” game. To access it, launch the Terminal app (in /Applications/Utilities/) and type emacs. Then press the escape key, followed by the ‘X’ key. The cursor will jump to the prompt at the bottom of the window. Type tetris (looks like they haven’t been sued yet!), and you’ll be rewarded with colored falling blocks. Use the cursor keys to move and rotate the blocks and the spacebar to drop them. One tip: make sure your window is a relatively normal aspect ratio, or the blocks might get confusing. When you want to finish, type ctrl-x followed by ctrl-c and it’ll spit you back out at the prompt.
There are a number of other games embedded in emacs, you can find the full list by going into Terminal and typing ls /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/play. Of them, my personal favorite isn’t really a game, so to speak. Follow the instructions above, but instead of tetris, type doctor. Great for saving on those high therapy bills.
[via digg]
xemacs and aqua emacs have a much better and easier to get to version of tetris and other games!