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Emacs is a text editor with a comprehensive set of features that is particularly popular with programmers and other technical computer users. The original Emacs was written in 1976 by Richard Stallman, as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. It has evolved from its dumb terminal origins into something resembling a full-blown word processor sporting a complete graphical user interface. A large number of extensions are available which can turn Emacs into anything from a web browser to a tool for writing and compiling computer programs.
This default splash screen greets the user running GNU Emacs in a graphical environment.
Many Emacs clones have appeared over the years, but most have faded into obscurity. The definitive version of Emacs today is GNU Emacs which is also written by Richard Stallman, starting in 1984. The most popular alternative is XEmacsXEmacs is a text editor derived from GNU Emacs. It capitalises on good GUI support, mainly for the X Window System. XEmacs runs on almost any Unix-like operating system (inside X or on a text terminal), as well as on Microsoft Windows. It also runs on Mac, which forkIn software, a project fork or branch happens when a developer (or a group of them) takes code from a project and starts to develop independently of the rest. The term is also used more loosely to represent a similar branching of any work (for example, thed from GNU Emacs in 19911991 like 2002, is a palindromic year. It also has the same calendar as 2002, including Easter on March 31. It is a common year starting on Tuesday. Events January January 2 Sharon Pratt Dixon is sworn in as mayor of Washington, DC becoming the first blac, and has synced with GNU Emacs regularly since.
The lower-case word emacs (humorously pluralized as emacsen) is sometimes used to mean the class of editors with behavior similar to the original Emacs. The capitalized word Emacs is often used synonymously with GNU Emacs.
Emacs is typically on one side of the editor warThe hacker community has a tradition of treating their favorite text editor with a reverence bordering on religious fanaticism. Many flame wars have been fought between groups insisting that their editor of choice is the paragon of editing perfection, ands (the other being vivi is a screen-oriented text editor computer program written by Bill Joy in 1976 for an early BSD release. The name comes from the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the command visual in ex. Which is ). The command in question switches the line editor).
Emacs began at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Prior to its introduction, TECOTECO may be: The acronym for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Republic of China's ( Taiwan) representations in countries that has no diplomatic relations. The acronym for a computer text editor called Text Editor and Corrector. A generic word used was the default editor in ITSITS the Incompatible Timesharing System was an early, revolutionary, and influential MIT time-sharing operating system; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC. ITS development was ini, the operating system on the AI Lab's PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers.
Unlike modern text editors, the TECO line editor separated typing, editing, and document display. Typing characters into TECO did not place those characters directly into a document. Instead, modifying a document involved writing a series of instructions in the TECO command language, during which time the edits these commands made were not shown in context — altered text was not shown embedded within the unchanged portion of the document. Displaying the edited version of the document required that a command be typed. This behavior is similar to the program ed, which is still in use.
Carl Mikkelsen, one of the hackers at the MIT AI Lab, added a display-editing mode to TECO, which allowed the screen display to be updated each time the user entered a keystroke. This more-intuitive behavior, which is used by most modern text editors, had been pioneered by the "E" editor written at the Stanford AI Lab. In 1974, Richard Stallman, another hacker, added a macro feature to the TECO display-editing mode. This allowed the user to define keystrokes which would perform multiple TECO commands.
The users at the AI Lab soon accumulated a large collection of custom macros. In 1976, Guy Steele began an effort to unify the many divergent macro sets. The project was completed by Stallman, who also wrote facilities for extension and self-documentation. The resulting program was called EMACS (all caps). Though built on TECO, its behavior was different enough to be considered a text editor in its own right.
"EMACS" stood for "Editor MACroS". According to Stallman, he picked the name Emacs "because < E > was not in use as an abbreviation on ITS at the time." It has also been pointed out that " Emack & Bolio's" was the name of a popular ice cream store in Boston, within walking distance of MIT. The text-formatting program used on ITS was called BOLIO. Stallman, however, denies that the ice cream was at all a factor in the naming of the editor, that he generally did not go to that store and had not liked their particular ice cream the one time he did try it.
EMACS soon became the standard editor on ITS. It was also ported from ITS to the Tenex and TOPS-20 operating systems by Stallman and Michael McMahon.
Several Emacs-like editors were written in the following years, including EINE (EINE Is Not EMACS) and ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially) by Michael McMahon and Daniel Weinreb. In 1978, Bernard Greenberg wrote Multics Emacs at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab. This editor was written in MacLisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language. User-supplied extensions were also written in Lisp. The choice of Lisp provided more extensibility than ever before, and has been followed by most subsequent emacsen. Later emacsen include Hemlock, Deuce, and Fred.
Gosling Emacs, the first Emacs-like editor to run on Unix, was written by James Gosling in 1981. It was written in C and used a stripped-down version of Lisp, known as Mocklisp, as an extension language.
In 1984, Stallman began writing a new emacs implementation, GNU Emacs, which became the first program in the nascent GNU project. GNU Emacs was written in C and used Emacs Lisp for extension. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was 15.34, which appeared in 1985. Like Gosling Emacs, GNU Emacs ran on Unix; however, GNU Emacs had more features, in particular a full-featured Lisp as extension language. As a result, it soon replaced Gosling Emacs as the de facto Emacs editor on Unix.
Beginning in 1991, Lucid Emacs was developed by Jamie Zawinski and others at Lucid Inc., based on an early alpha version of GNU Emacs 19. The codebases soon diverged, and the separate development teams gave up trying to merge them back into a single program. This was one of the most famous early forks of a free software program. Lucid Emacs has since been renamed XEmacs; it and GNU Emacs remain the two most popular varieties in use today.
Emacs versions used to have a "1" in front of them (1.21.3.1), but the changes made to Emacs were all considered so minor that the number would never change. Therefore, the "1" was dropped, and the version numbers made slightly simpler (21.3.1).