![]() Current GNU Emacs logo | |
![]() GNU Emacs 26.2 running on GNOME 3 | |
Original author(s) | Richard Stallman |
---|---|
Developer(s) | GNU Project |
Initial release | 20 March 1985 |
Stable release | |
Preview release | |
Repository | |
Written in | Emacs Lisp, C [2] |
Operating system | Unix-like (GNU, Linux, macOS, BSDs, Solaris), Windows, MS-DOS [3] |
Platform | Cross-platform |
Available in | English |
Type | Text editor |
License | GPL-3.0-or-later |
Website | www |
GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. [4] [5] Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor." [6]
The original EMACS was written in 1976 by David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of macros for the TECO editor, and in 1984, Richard Stallman began work on GNU Emacs, to produce a free software alternative to the proprietary Gosling Emacs. GNU Emacs was initially based on Gosling Emacs, but Stallman's replacement of its Mocklisp interpreter with a true Lisp interpreter required that nearly all of its code be rewritten. This became the first program released by the then-nascent GNU Project. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp, also implemented in C, as an extension language. Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was version 15.34, released later in 1985. Early versions of GNU Emacs were numbered as "1.x.x," with the initial digit denoting the version of the C core. The "1" was dropped after version 1.12 as it was thought that the major number would never change, and thus the major version skipped from "1" to "13". A new third version number was added to represent changes made by user sites. [7] In the current numbering scheme, a number with two components signifies a release version, with development versions having three components. [8]
GNU Emacs was later ported to the Unix operating system. It offered more features than Gosling Emacs, in particular a full-featured Lisp as its extension language, and soon replaced Gosling Emacs as the de facto Unix Emacs editor. Markus Hess exploited a security flaw in GNU Emacs's email subsystem in his 1986 cracking spree, in which he gained superuser access to Unix computers. [9]
Although users commonly submitted patches and Elisp code to the net.emacs newsgroup, participation in GNU Emacs development was relatively restricted until 1999, and was used as an example of the "Cathedral" development style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar . The project has since adopted a public development mailing list and anonymous CVS access. Development took place in a single CVS trunk until 2008, and today uses the Git [10] DVCS.
Richard Stallman has remained the principal maintainer of GNU Emacs, but he has stepped back from the role at times. Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong have overseen maintenance since 2008. [11] On September 21, 2015 Monnier announced that he would be stepping down as maintainer effective with the feature freeze of Emacs 25. [12] Longtime contributor John Wiegley was announced as the new maintainer on November 5, 2015. [13] Wiegley was joined by Eli Zaretskii in July, 2016, [14] [16] and Lars Ingebrigtsen in September, 2020. [17]
The terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) state that the Emacs source code, including both the C and Emacs Lisp components, are freely available for examination, modification, and redistribution.
Older versions of the GNU Emacs documentation appeared under an ad-hoc license that required the inclusion of certain text in any modified copy. In the GNU Emacs user's manual, for example, this included instructions for obtaining GNU Emacs and Richard Stallman's essay The GNU Manifesto . The XEmacs manuals, which were inherited from older GNU Emacs manuals when the fork occurred, have the same license. Newer versions of the documentation use the GNU Free Documentation License with "invariant sections" that require the inclusion of the same documents and that the manuals proclaim themselves as GNU Manuals.[ citation needed ]
For GNU Emacs, like many other GNU packages, it remains policy to accept significant code contributions only if the copyright holder executes a suitable disclaimer or assignment of their copyright interest to the Free Software Foundation (FSF.) Small contributions of fewer than 10 lines of code are exempt. This policy is in place so that the FSF can defend the software in court if its copyleft license is violated.
In 2011, it was noticed that GNU Emacs had been accidentally releasing some binaries without corresponding source code for two years, in opposition to the intended spirit of the GPL. [18] [19] [20] Richard Stallman described this incident as "a very bad mistake," [21] which was promptly fixed. The FSF did not sue any downstream redistributors who unknowingly violated the GPL by distributing these binaries.
In its normal editing mode, GNU Emacs behaves like common text editors by allowing the user to type text with the keyboard and move the editing point with arrow keys. Escape key sequences or pressing the control key and/or the meta key, alt key or super keys in conjunction with a regular key produces modified keystrokes that invoke functions from the Emacs Lisp environment. Commands such as save-buffer
and save-buffers-kill-emacs
combine multiple modified keystrokes.
Some GNU Emacs commands work by invoking external programs, such as ispell for spell-checking and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for program compilation. Emacs also supports "inferior processes," long-lived child processes that interact with the editor. This is used to implement shell-mode, running a Unix shell as inferior process, as well as read–eval–print loop (REPL) modes for various programming languages. Emacs' support for external processes makes it suitable for interactive programming along the lines of Interlisp or Smalltalk. [22]
Users who prefer the widely used IBM Common User Access keyboard shortcut layout can use cua-mode, a package that originally was a third-party add-on but has been included in GNU Emacs since version 22.
Emacs uses the "minibuffer," normally the bottommost line, to display messages and request information, functions that are often performed by dialog boxes in GUI editors. The minibuffer holds information such as text to target in a search or the name of a file to read or save. When applicable, command-line completion is available using the tab and space keys.
Emacs keeps text in data structures known as buffers. Buffers may or may not be displayed onscreen, and all buffer features are accessible by both Emacs Lisp programs and the user interface. [23] The user can create new buffers and dismiss unwanted ones, and many buffers can exist at the same time, limited only by available memory. [24] Emacs can be configured to save the list of open buffers on exit, and reopen this list when it is restarted. [25]
Some buffers contain text loaded from text files, which the user can edit and save back to permanent storage. These buffers are said to be "visiting" files. Buffers also serve to display other data, such as the output of Emacs commands, dired directory listings, documentation strings displayed by the "help" library and notification messages that in other editors would be displayed in a dialog box. Some of these notifications are displayed briefly in the minibuffer, and GNU Emacs provides a *Messages* buffer that keeps a history of the most recent notifications of this type. When the minibuffer is used for output from Emacs, it is called the "echo area". [26] Longer notifications are displayed in buffers of their own. The maximum length of messages that will be displayed in the minibuffer is, of course, configurable.
Buffers can also serve as input and output areas for an external process such as a shell or REPL. Buffers which Emacs creates on its own are typically named with asterisks on each end, to distinguish from user buffers. The list of open buffers is itself displayed in this type of buffer.
Most Emacs key sequences remain functional in any buffer. For example, the standard Ctrl-s isearch
function can be used to search filenames in dired buffers, and the file list can be saved to a text file just as any other buffer. Dired buffers can be switched to a writable mode, in which filenames and attributes can be edited textually; when the buffer is saved, the changes are written to the filesystem. This allows multiple files to be renamed using the search and replace features of Emacs. When so equipped, Emacs displays image files in buffers. Emacs is binary safe and 8-bit clean. [27]
Emacs can split the editing area into separate non-overlapping sections called "windows," a feature that has been available since 1975, predating the graphical user interface in common use. In Emacs terminology, "windows" are similar to what other systems call "frames" or "panes" – a rectangular portion of the program's display that can be updated and interacted with independently. Each Emacs window has a status bar called the "mode line" displayed by default at the bottom edge of the window. Emacs windows are available both in text-terminal and graphical modes and allow more than one buffer, or several parts of a buffer, to be displayed at once. Common applications are to display a dired buffer along with the contents of files in the current directory (there are special modes to make the file buffer follow the file highlighted in dired), to display the source code of a program in one window while another displays a shell buffer with the results of compiling the program, to run a debugger along with a shell buffer running the program, to work on code while displaying a man page or other documentation (possibly loaded over the World Wide Web using one of Emacs' built-in web browsers) or simply to display multiple files for editing at once such as a header along with its implementation file for C-based languages. In addition, there is follow-mode, a minor mode that chains windows to display non-overlapping portions of a buffer. Using follow-mode, a single file can be displayed in multiple side-by-side windows that update appropriately when scrolled. In addition, Emacs supports "narrowing" a buffer to display only a portion of a file, with top/bottom of buffer navigation functionality and buffer size calculations reflecting only the selected range.
Emacs windows are tiled and cannot appear "above" or "below" their companions. Emacs can launch multiple "frames", which are displayed as individual windows in a graphical environment. On a text terminal, multiple frames are displayed stacked filling the entire terminal, and can be switched using the standard Emacs commands. [28]
GNU Emacs can display or edit a variety of different types of text and adapts its behavior by entering add-on modes called "major modes". There are major modes for many different purposes including editing ordinary text files, the source code of many markup and programming languages, as well as displaying web pages, directory listings and other system info. Each major mode involves an Emacs Lisp program that extends the editor to behave more conveniently for the specified type of text. Major modes typically provide some or all of the following common features:
The use of "minor modes" enables further customization. A GNU Emacs editing buffer can use only one major mode at a time, but multiple minor modes can operate simultaneously. These may operate directly on documents, as in the way the major mode for the C programming language defines a separate minor mode for each of its popular indent styles, or they may alter the editing environment. Examples of the latter include a mode that adds the ability to undo changes to the window configuration and one that performs on-the-fly syntax checking. There is also a minor mode that allows multiple major modes to be used in a single file, for convenience when editing a document in which multiple programming languages are embedded.
GNU Emacs supports the capability to use it as an interpreter for the Emacs Lisp language without displaying the text editor user interface. In batch mode, user configuration is not loaded and the terminal interrupt characters C-c and C-z will have their usual effect of exiting the program or suspending execution instead of invoking Emacs keybindings. GNU Emacs has command line options to specify either a file to load and execute, or an Emacs Lisp function may be passed in from the command line. Emacs will start up, execute the passed-in file or function, print the results, then exit. [30] The shebang line #!/usr/bin/emacs --script
allows the creation of standalone scripts in Emacs Lisp. [31]
The GNU Emacs Manual, written by Richard Stallman, is bundled with GNU Emacs and can be viewed with the built-in info browser. [32] Two additional manuals, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual by Bil Lewis, Richard Stallman, and Dan Laliberte and An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp by Robert Chassell, are included. All three manuals are also published in book form by the Free Software Foundation.
GNU Emacs has support for many alphabets, scripts, writing systems, and cultural conventions and provides spell-checking for many languages by calling external programs such as ispell. Version 24 added support for bidirectional text and left-to-right and right-to-left writing direction for languages such as Arabic, Persian and Hebrew.
Many character encoding systems, including UTF-8, are supported. GNU Emacs uses UTF-8 for its encoding as of version 23, while prior versions used their own encoding internally and performed conversion upon load and save. The internal encoding used by XEmacs is similar to that of GNU Emacs but differs in details.
The GNU Emacs user interface originated in English and, with the exception of the beginners' tutorial, has not been translated into any other language.
A subsystem called Emacspeak enables visually impaired and blind users to control the editor through audio feedback.
The behavior of GNU Emacs can be modified and extended almost without limit by incorporating Emacs Lisp programs that define new commands, new buffer modes, new keymaps, add command-line options, [33] and so on. Many extensions providing user-facing functionality define a major mode (either for a new file type or to build a non-text-editing user interface); others define only commands or minor modes, or provide functions that enhance another extension.
Since version 24 GNU Emacs includes a built-in package manager accessible with the list-packages
command that allows users to search for and install packages. Historically, packages were downloaded manually, often distributed through the Usenet newsgroup gnu.emacs.sources. Over time many popular packages have been included in Emacs by default; for example version 21 began bundling Org-mode, Calc, TRAMP, and many others. [34]
Notable packages include:
In its early history, GNU Emacs often ran noticeably slower than rival text editors because the loading and interpreting of its Lisp-based code incurs a performance overhead. Modern computers are powerful enough to run GNU Emacs with ease, but versions prior to 19.29 (released in 1995) couldn't edit files larger than 8 MB. The file size limit was raised in successive versions, and 32 bit versions after GNU Emacs 23.2 can edit files up to 512 MB in size. Emacs compiled on a 64-bit machine can handle much larger buffers. [39]
While GNU Emacs is largely written in Emacs Lisp, it makes extensive use of natively compiled C code to improve performance. In addition to its own C code, it uses external libraries such as libxml2 for parsing XML. Packages installed by the user can load dynamic modules. [40]
Since version 28.1, Emacs can natively compile Emacs Lisp files via libgccjit
, as opposed to just byte compiling them, resulting in a significant boost in performance. [41] [42]
GNU Emacs runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including DOS, Windows, [43] [44] [45] and most Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, the various BSDs, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and macOS. [46] [47] [48] Many Unix-like systems include Emacs by default. [49] In 2023 an official port for Android was released. [50] Version 23.1 removed supported for some platforms deemed obsolete. [3]
GNU Emacs runs both on text terminals and in graphical user interface (GUI) environments. On Unix-like operating systems, GNU Emacs can use the X Window System to produce its GUI either directly using Athena widgets or by using a "widget toolkit" such as Motif, LessTif, or GTK+. GNU Emacs can also use the graphics systems native to macOS and Windows to provide menubars, toolbars, scrollbars and context menus conforming more closely to each platform's look and feel.
Lucid Emacs, based on an early version of GNU Emacs 19, was developed beginning in 1991 by Jamie Zawinski and others at Lucid Inc. One of the best-known forks in free software development occurred when the codebases of the two Emacs versions diverged and the separate development teams ceased efforts to merge them back into a single program. [51] After Lucid filed for bankruptcy, Lucid Emacs was renamed XEmacs. [52] XEmacs development has slowed, with the most recent stable version 21.4.22 released in January 2009, while GNU Emacs has implemented many formerly XEmacs-only features. This has led some users to proclaim XEmacs' death. [53]
Other forks, less known than XEmacs, include:
Changes in each Emacs release are listed in a NEWS file distributed with Emacs. [57] Changes brought about by downgrading to the previous release are listed in an "Antinews" file, often with some snarky commentary on why this might be desirable. [58]
Version | Release date | Significant changes [59] |
---|---|---|
29.4 | June 22, 2024 | Emergency maintenance release. Arbitrary and possibly malicious shell commands are no longer run when turning on Org mode. [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] |
29.3 | March 24, 2024 | Emergency maintenance release. Arbitrary and possibly malicious Lisp code is no longer evaluated as part of turning on Org mode. [66] |
29.2 | January 18, 2024 | Bugfix release [67] |
29.1 | July 30, 2023 | Adds Tree-sitter parser integration and a pure GTK frontend enabling Wayland support. Bundles popular packages including language server protocol package Eglot, package manager use-package, and csharp-mode for C# programming. [68] [69] [70] |
28.2 | September 12, 2022 | A bug-fix release with no new features. [71] |
28.1 | April 4, 2022 | Native compilation of Lisp files. Text shaping with HarfBuzz and drawing with Cairo. Support for loading Secure Computing filters. Much improved display of Emoji and Emoji sequences. Mode-specific commands. Emacs shows matching parentheses by default. |
27.2 | March 25, 2021 | Mainly a bugfix release. [72] |
27.1 | August 10, 2020 | Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Lexical-binding is used by default. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick. |
26.3 | August 28, 2019 | New GPG key for GNU Emacs Lisp Package Archive (ELPA) package signature checking. |
26.2 | April 12, 2019 | Emacs modules can now be built outside of the Emacs tree source. Compliance with Unicode version 11.0. |
26.1 | May 28, 2018 | Limited form of concurrency with Lisp threads. Support for optional display of line numbers in the buffer. Emacs now uses double buffering to reduce flicker on the X Window System. Flymake has been completely redesigned. TRAMP has a new connection method for Google Drive. New single-line horizontal scrolling mode. A systemd user unit file is provided. Support for 24-bit colors on capable text terminals. [73] |
25.3 | September 11, 2017 | Emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in Emacs. [74] |
25.2 | April 21, 2017 | Mainly a bugfix release. [75] |
25.1 | September 17, 2016 | Support for loading shared/dynamic libraries (modules). Validation of TLS/SSL certificates. New minor mode 'electric-quote-mode' for using curved quotes. Character folding support in isearch.el. Support for embedding native widgets inside Emacs buffers. New and improved facilities for inserting Unicode characters. [76] |
24.5 | April 10, 2015 | Mainly a bugfix release. [77] [78] |
24.4 | October 20, 2014 | Support for ACLs (access control lists) and digital signatures of Emacs Lisp packages. Improved fullscreen and multi-monitor support. Support for saving and restoring the state of frames and windows. Improved menu support on text terminals. Another built-in web browser (M-x eww ). A new rectangular mark mode (C-x SPC ). File notification support. [79] |
24.3 | March 10, 2013 | Generalized variables are now in core Emacs Lisp, an update for the Common Lisp emulation library, and a new major mode for Python. [80] |
24.2 | August 27, 2012 | Bugfix release [81] |
24.1 | June 10, 2012 | ELPA, support for native color themes, optional GTK+3, support for bi-directional input, support for lexical scoping in Emacs Lisp [82] |
23.4 | January 29, 2012 | Fixes a security flaw. [83] |
23.3 | March 10, 2011 | Improved functionality for using Emacs with version control systems. |
23.2 | May 8, 2010 | New tools for using Emacs as an IDE, including navigation across a project and automatic Makefile generation. New major mode for editing JavaScript source. In GUIs, the cursor is hidden while the user types. |
23.1 | July 29, 2009 | Support for anti-aliased fonts on X through Xft, [84] better Unicode support, Doc-view mode and new packages for viewing PDF and PostScript files, connection to processes through D-Bus (dbus), connection to the GNU Privacy Guard (EasyPG), nXML mode for editing XML documents, Ruby mode for editing Ruby programs, and more. Use of the Carbon GUI libraries on Mac OS X was replaced by use of the more modern Cocoa GUI libraries. |
22.3 | September 5, 2008 | GTK+ toolkit support, enhanced mouse support, a new keyboard macro system, improved Unicode support, and drag-and-drop operation on X. Many new modes and packages including a graphical user interface to GDB, Python mode, the mathematical tool Calc, and the remote file editing system Tramp ("Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol"). [85] |
22.2 | March 26, 2008 | New support for the Bazaar, Mercurial, Monotone, and Git version control systems. New major modes for editing CSS, Vera, Verilog, and BibTeX style files. Improved scrolling support in Image mode. |
22.1 | June 2, 2007 | Support for the GTK+ graphical toolkit, support for drag-and-drop on X, support for the Mac OS X Carbon UI, org-mode version 4.67d included [86] |
21.1 | October 20, 2001 | Support for displaying colors and some other attributes on terminals, built-in horizontal scrolling, sound support, wheel mouse support, improved menu-bar layout, support for images, toolbar, and tooltips, Unicode support |
20.1 | September 17, 1997 | Multi-lingual support |
19.34 | August 22, 1996 | Bug fix release with no user-visible changes [87] |
19.31 | May 25, 1996 [88] | Emacs opens X11 frames by default, scroll bars on Windows 95 and NT, subprocesses on Windows 95, recover-session to recover multiple files after a crash, some [[doctor.el]] features removed to comply with the US Communications Decency Act [87] |
19.30 | November 24, 1995 | Multiple frame support on MS Windows, menu bar available on text terminals, pc-select package to emulate common Windows and Macintosh keybindings. [87] |
19.29 | June 19, 1995 [89] | Significant improvements to performance, font support, and image handling. It offered faster performance, expanded font options, including scalable fonts, and enhanced image format support. Additionally, it improved internationalization features and introduced more customization options, further enhancing the user experience. |
19.28 | November 1, 1994 | First official v19 release. Support for multiple frames using the X Windowing System; VC, a new interface for version control systems, font-lock mode, hexl mode for hexadecimal editing. |
18.59 | October 31, 1992 | Emacs 18.59 included enhancements and bug fixes compared to previous versions of Emacs 18.x. |
18.53 | February 23, 1989 | Emacs 18.53 introduced support for font-locking, which allowed syntax highlighting in different programming modes. This feature greatly enhanced the readability of code by highlighting different language elements with distinct colors or styles. It also included various bug fixes and improvements over previous versions. |
18.52 | August 17, 1988 | Introduced spook.el , a library for adding some "distract the NSA" keywords to every message you send. [90] |
18.24 | October 2, 1986 | Server mode, [91] M-x disassemble , Emacs can open TCP connections, emacs -nw to open Emacs in console mode on xterms. |
17.36 | December 20, 1985 | Backup file version numbers |
16.56 | July 15, 1985 | First Emacs 16 release. Emacs-lisp-mode distinct from lisp-mode, [92] remove all code from Gosling Emacs due to copyright issues [93] |
13.8? | March 20, 1985 | First release. However, the VAXSIG VAX85b DECUS tape has version 13.8 with file dates of June 19, 1985 with RCS files dated March 31, 1985. It's a badly damaged copy. Version 13.9 is referenced in the news file, [92] so 13.8 may have been the first release since there are no other 13.x releases named. |
The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.
Emacs Lisp is a Lisp dialect made for Emacs. It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter.
XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows. XEmacs is a fork, based on a version of GNU Emacs from the late 1980s. Any user can download, use, and modify XEmacs as free software available under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.
Gnus, or Gnus Network User Services, is a message reader which is part of GNU Emacs. It supports reading and composing both e-mail and news and can also act as an RSS reader, web processor, and directory browser for both local and remote filesystems.
Texinfo is a typesetting syntax used for generating documentation in both on-line and printed form with a single source file. It is implemented by a computer program released as free software of the same name, created and made available by the GNU Project from the Free Software Foundation.
In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an early form of human–computer interaction, before the advent of bitmapped displays and modern conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Like modern GUIs, they can use the entire screen area and may accept mouse and other inputs. They may also use color and often structure the display using box-drawing characters such as ┌ and ╣. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator.
Zmacs is one of the many variants of the Emacs text editor. Zmacs was written for the MIT Lisp machine and runs on its descendants. Zmacs is written in Lisp Machine Lisp. It is based on the ZWEI programming substrate, which stands for "Zwei Was EINE Initially"; Zwei was a collection of routines which could be used to easily implement other programs, like the Symbolics mail program, Zmail.
Conkeror is a Mozilla-based web browser designed to be navigated primarily by a computer keyboard. Its design is mainly patterned after the text editor GNU Emacs, with some influence from other programs, including vi.
ERC is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client integrated into GNU Emacs. It is written in Emacs Lisp.
Dunnet is a surreal, cyberpunk text adventure written by Ron Schnell, based on a game he wrote in 1982. The name is derived from the first three letters of dungeon and the last three letters of ARPANET. It was first written in Maclisp for the DECSYSTEM-20, then ported to Emacs Lisp in 1992. Since 1994 the game has shipped with GNU Emacs; it also has been included with XEmacs.
This article provides basic comparisons for notable text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the Category of text editor features and from the individual products' articles. This article may not be up-to-date or necessarily all-inclusive.
GNU Readline is a software library that provides in-line editing and history capabilities for interactive programs with a command-line interface, such as Bash. It is currently maintained by Chet Ramey as part of the GNU Project.
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
Hemlock is a free Emacs text editor for most POSIX-compliant Unix systems. It follows the tradition of the Lisp Machine editor ZWEI and the ITS/TOPS-20 implementation of Emacs, but differs from XEmacs or GNU Emacs, the most popular Emacs variants, in that it is written in Common Lisp rather than Emacs Lisp and C—although it borrows features from the later editors. Hemlock was originally written by the CMU Spice project in Spice Lisp for the PERQ computer.
EINE and ZWEI are two discontinued Emacs-like text editors developed by Daniel Weinreb and Mike McMahon for Lisp machines in the 1970s and 1980s.
Dired is a computer program for editing file system directories. It typically runs inside the Emacs text editor as a specialized mode, though standalone versions have been written. Dired was the first file manager, or visual editor of file system information. The first version of Dired was written as a stand-alone program independently in 1972 by Dave Lebling at Project MAC, and circa 1974 by Stan Kugell at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). It was incorporated into GNU Emacs from the earliest versions, and re-implemented in C and C++ on other operating systems.
Multics Emacs is an early implementation of the Emacs text editor. It was written in Maclisp by Bernard Greenberg at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab in 1978, as a successor to the original 1976 TECO implementation of Emacs and a precursor of later GNU Emacs.
Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.4, released June 2024.
There is a new version numbering scheme. What used to be the first version number, which was 1, has been discarded since it does not seem that I need three levels of version number. However, a new third version number has been added to represent changes by user sites. This number will always be zero in Emacs when I distribute it; it will be incremented each time Emacs is built at another site.
A version number with two components (e.g., '22.1') indicates a released version; three components indicate a development version (e.g., '23.0.50' is what will eventually become '23.1').
However, it is still possible to create multiple "frames" on text terminals; such frames are displayed one at a time, filling the entire terminal screen
A face is a font and colour combination.
In batch mode, Emacs does not display the text being edited, and the standard terminal interrupt characters such as C-z and C-c have their usual effect. Emacs functions that normally print a message in the echo area will print to either the standard output stream (stdout) or the standard error stream (stderr) instead. (To be precise, functions like prin1, princ and print print to stdout, while message and error print to stderr.) Functions that normally read keyboard input from the minibuffer take their input from the terminal's standard input stream (stdin) instead.
GNU Emacs NEWS – history of user-visible changes.
For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about downgrading to Emacs version 24.5. We hope you will enjoy the greater simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 25.2 features.
... 2024-06-22 - Emacs 29.4 released...
... Emacs 29.4; Released Jun 22, 2024; Emacs 29.4 is an emergency maintenance release.
Emacs 29.4 is an emergency bugfix release; it includes no new features except a small number of changes intended to resolve a security vulnerability uncovered in Emacs 29.3 and earlier.
Version 29.4 of the Emacs editor has been released. This is "an emergency bugfix release" fixing a vulnerability that can cause the editor to execute arbitrary shell code in Org mode.
Emacs 29.4 is an emergency bugfix release intended to fix the security vulnerability described below...Arbitrary shell commands are no longer run when turning on Org mode. This is for security reasons, to avoid running malicious commands.
Here is a vulnerability in Emacs Org mode...The fix is attached. It is against Org mode git repository. The fix can be applied to older versions of Org mode/Emacs if deemed necessary...The fix has been included into Emacs 29.4 and Org 9.7.5 (released yesterday).
Tramp [...] stands for "Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol."
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)Programs such as mailers that invoke "the editor" as an inferior to edit some text can now be told to use an existing Emacs process instead of creating a new editor.