Będąc oficjalnym projektem GNU, ściśle przestrzega standardów kodowania GNU i układu katalogów. To powiedziawszy, jeśli eksplorujesz drzewo źródłowe, zacznę, podobnie jak w przypadku większości projektów, z plikiem README w katalogu głównym.
Od tego pliku istnieje kilka podkatalogów:
`src' holds the C code for Emacs (the Emacs Lisp interpreter and
its primitives, the redisplay code, and some basic editing
functions).
`lisp' holds the Emacs Lisp code for Emacs (almost everything else).
`leim' holds the library of Emacs input methods, Lisp code and
auxiliary data files required to type international characters
which can't be directly produced by your keyboard.
`lib-src' holds the source code for some utility programs for use by or
with Emacs, like movemail and etags.
`etc' holds miscellaneous architecture-independent data files
Emacs uses, like the tutorial text and the Zippy, the Pinhead
quote database. The contents of the `lisp', `leim', `info',
`man', `lispref', and `lispintro' subdirectories are
architecture-independent too.
`info' holds the Info documentation tree for Emacs.
`doc/emacs' holds the source code for the Emacs Manual. If you modify the
manual sources, you will need the `makeinfo' program to produce
an updated manual. `makeinfo' is part of the GNU Texinfo
package; you need version 4.6 or later of Texinfo.
`doc/lispref' holds the source code for the Emacs Lisp reference manual.
`doc/lispintro' holds the source code for the Introduction to Programming
in Emacs Lisp manual.
`msdos' holds configuration files for compiling Emacs under MS-DOS.
`nt' holds various command files and documentation files that pertain
to building and running Emacs on Windows 9X/ME/NT/2000/XP.
`test' holds tests for various aspects of Emacs's functionality.