Another very important field is the LaTeX typesetting system. Programmers produce them every day in large numbers, and HTML web pages or simple emails are plain text files, too. Why Such Dull Text Files at All?ĭespite the ubiquitous (often proprietary) binary file formats, text files are used everywhere. There are hundreds of such programs out there, but Emacs merges most of their abilities into a single editor. What Can Emacs Do?ĭespite all the extensions and plug-ins, by and large Emacs is still a text editor for plain text files. On the other hand, you get an amazing amount of functionality, and on a typical modern computer its size doesn't hurt much. It has always been a rather resource-consuming tool. Today Emacs' standard source code (version 21) has a size of 70MBytes (although the compiled version is much smaller), which seems to be ridiculously large for a plain text editor. Generations of hackers, students, professors and other volunteers have made their contributions. Since then, the program has been considered mature and stable, but users and developers are never content.

With version 19, the program was split up into two major projects: The XEmacs, and the GNU Emacs, the 'classical' one. A period of intensive development followed until the early 1990s. However, in the middle of 1985 version 15 was released (containing a substantial amount of code written by James Gosling, who later created the Java language). The Early YearsĮmacs' childhood lasted until 1985 and is a bit of a mystery. Emacs, however, was re-written to an independent program - and survived. As you can see, all these things have long become extinct. TECO ran under the very ancient ITS operating system 4 on prehistoric DEC PDP-10 computers, which were very popular at that time. The name Emacs means 'Editor Macros' - it started as a set of macros for an ancient text editor called TECO 3. Emacs was born in 1976 at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). BirthĮmacs is a typical child of the hacker subculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, 'classical' Emacs is part of GNU 2. Its principal author is Richard Stallman, the initiator of the GNU open software project 1. It's free software - you don't have to pay for it - available from the GNU Project. Nevertheless, Emacs is very widely used and probably the favourite editor for professional computer users. It's an extremely powerful tool, and therefore not trivial to handle.

Emacs is a computer program for editing plain text files such as source codes, web pages, emails, or print documents, and it works with all major computer systems.

Emacs text editor guide