<
text, tool> /ee'maks/ (Editing MACroS, or Extensible MACro
System, GNU
Emacs) A popular
screen editor for
Unix and
most other
operating systems.
Emacs is distributed by the
Free Software Foundation and was
Richard Stallman's first step in the
GNU project.
Emacs
is extensible - it is easy to add new functions; customisable
- you can rebind keys, and modify the behaviour of existing
functions; self-documenting - there is extensive on-line,
context-sensitive help; and has a real-time "what you see is
what you get" display.
Emacs is writen in
C and the higher
levels are programmed in
Emacs Lisp.
Emacs has an entire
Lisp system inside it. It was
originally written in
TECO under
ITS at the
MIT {AI
lab}. AI Memo 554 described it as "an advanced,
self-documenting, customisable, extensible real-time display
editor".
It includes facilities to view directories, run compilation
subprocesses and send and receive
electronic mail and
Usenet news (
GNUS).
W3 is a
web browser, the
ange-ftp package provides transparent access to files on
remote
FTP servers.
Calc is a calculator and {symbolic
mathematics} package. There are "modes" provided to assist in
editing most well-known programming languages. Most of these
extra functions are configured to load automatically on first
use, reducing start-up time and memory consumption. Many
hackers (including
Denis Howe) spend more than 80% of their
tube time inside
Emacs.
GNU
Emacs is available for
Unix,
VMS,
GNU/
Linux,
FreeBSD,
NetBSD,
OpenBSD,
MS Windows,
MS-DOS, and
other systems.
Emacs has been re-implemented more than 30
times. Other variants include
GOSMACS, CCA
Emacs, UniPress
Emacs, Montgomery
Emacs, and
XEmacs.
Jove,
epsilon, and
MicroEmacs are limited look-alikes.
Some
Emacs versions running under
window managers iconify as
an overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one
feature the editor does not (yet) include. Indeed, some
hackers find
Emacs too
heavyweight and
baroque for their
taste, and expand the name as "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift"
to spoof its heavy reliance on keystrokes decorated with
bucky bits. Other spoof expansions include "Eight Megabytes
And Constantly Swapping", "Eventually "malloc()'s All Computer
Storage", and "
Emacs Makes A Computer Slow" (see {recursive
acronym}). See also
vi.
Latest version: 20.6, as of 2000-05-11. 21.1 (
RSN) adds a
new redisplay engine with support for
proportional text,
images,
toolbars,
tool tips, toolkit scroll bars, and a
mouse-sensitive mode line.
FTP from your nearest
GNU archive site.
E-mail: (bug reports only) <
bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>.
Usenet newsgroups:
news:gnu.emacs.help,
news:gnu.emacs.bug,
news:alt.religion.emacs,
news:gnu.emacs.sources,
news:gnu.emacs.announce.
[
Jargon File]
(1997-02-04)