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What is Emacs?

*Sample of GNU Emacs in HTML mode - click to enlarge.*

Emacs is a powerful text editor package originally developed for UNIX. Emacs stands for ``Editor Macros''. The first version was written by Richard Stallman at M.I.T. in 1976 and consisted of a small collection of text editing tools or macros written for the now obsolete TECO line editor. Since then, Emacs has grown into a huge program, with a full installation occupying 60Mb of disk space. It incorporates many features not normally associated with a text editor including; e-mail, a file manager, multi-lingual support, and development/debugging aids for programmers. It allows the editing of two or more files and can adapt its behaviour for editing formatted text files. At the heart of Emacs is an Elisp interpreter: Elisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. This allows an unprecedented level of customisation and extensibilty, and is certainly a key influence in the rapid development of Emacs. The most common version of Emacs is written by the Free Software Foundation and called GNU Emacs. It is freely available for a whole range of computers, from desktop PC's right through to large mainframes. Details of how to obtain the latest release of GNU Emacs can be found at www.emacs.org.

To find out more about the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, click here.

Written by George Beckett