20 Facts About Emacs

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 its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, continues actively; the latest version is 28.

XEmacs is a variant that branched from GNU Emacs in 1991.

Emacs is, along with vi, one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture.

Emacs is among the oldest free and open source projects still under development.

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Emacs development began during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab, whose PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers used the Incompatible Timesharing System operating system that featured a default line editor known as Tape Editor and Corrector .

Emacs was impressed by the editor's intuitive WYSIWYG behavior, which has since become the default behavior of most modern text editors.

Multics Emacs was later maintained by Richard Soley, who went on to develop the NILE Emacs-like editor for the NIL Project, and by Barry Margolin.

Many versions of Emacs, including GNU Emacs, would later adopt Lisp as an extension language.

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.

GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp, implemented in C, as an extension language.

In September 2014, it was announced on the GNU emacs-devel mailing list that GNU Emacs would adopt a rapid release strategy and version numbers would increment more quickly in the future.

GNU Emacs development was relatively closed until 1999 and was used as an example of the Cathedral development style in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Emacs is primarily a text editor and is designed for manipulating pieces of text, although it is capable of formatting and printing documents like a word processor by interfacing with external programs such as LaTeX, Ghostscript or a web browser.

Emacs provides commands to manipulate and differentially display semantic units of text such as words, sentences, paragraphs and source code constructs such as functions.

GNU Emacs is a real-time display editor, as its edits are displayed onscreen as they occur.

Almost all of the functionality in Emacs, including basic editing operations such as the insertion of characters into a file, is achieved through functions written in a dialect of the Lisp programming language.

Any interaction with the editor is realized by evaluating Emacs Lisp code, typically a command, which is a function explicitly designed for interactive use.

Church of Emacs, formed by Richard Stallman, is a parody religion created for Emacs users.

The Space-cadet keyboard on which Emacs was developed had oversized Control keys that were adjacent to the space bar and were easy to reach with the thumb.