GNU Emacs facts for kids
 |
|
GNU Emacs 26.2 running on GNOME 3
|
|
| Original author(s) | Richard Stallman |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | GNU Project |
| Initial release | 20 March 1985 |
| Stable release |
26.3 / 28 August 2019
|
| Preview release |
27.0.91 / 19 April 2020
|
| Written in | Emacs Lisp, C |
| Operating system | Unix-like (GNU, Linux, macOS, BSDs, Solaris), Windows, MS-DOS |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Text editor |
| License | GPLv3+ |
GNU Emacs (short for Editing Macros) is a text editor that is common on many UNIX-based operating systems.
Emacs is primarily used by programmers.
Emacs is made powerful by Emacs Lisp, a built-in programming language that lets the user extend the capabilities of the editor.
A common Emacs joke is that all of the functions of the editor are crazy weird keystrokes (such as "control-meta-4 shift-left-P-semicolon-F1" to do something simple like cut and paste text). In reality, though, these keystrokes are relatively simple, though they can take some getting used to.
There is an Internet turf war between programmers that prefer Emacs and programmers that prefer Vim (or Vi), another common text editor.
Images for kids
-
Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and author of GNU Emacs
-
Editing multiple Dired buffers in GNU Emacs
-
Editing C source code in GNU Emacs
-
Editing and compiling C++ code from GNU Emacs
-
GNU Emacs Manual (cover art by Etienne Suvasa; cover design by Matt Lee)
-
GNU Emacs with AUCTeX, a set of tools for editing TeX and LaTeX documents
