To enter Emacs type sxemacs and press the Return key at the shell i.e. sxemacs RET. This will bring up an emacs window with ‘*scratch*’ as the default buffer because Emacs must always have a buffer to work on. Then choose the Open... option from the File menu on the menubar at the top of the frame. It will prompt you to enter a filename. After you enter the filename, Emacs will read that file into the current buffer. You can also type :
sxemacs <filename> RET
directly which will bring up an Emacs frame with the filename as the buffer.